Somerset House shimmers

A beauty awakened: court, cafes, classes, and 3 museums

By Christine Temin, Globe Staff, 10/20/02

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LONDON — One of the grandest architectural ensembles in all of Europe, Somerset House sits squarely on the Strand, a few minutes' walk from Trafalgar Square. Not exactly an obscure location, this.

Yet the site has for centuries maintained an air of forbidding mystery. A palace that was traditionally home to British queens once stood there, so hoi polloi were not exactly welcome. A tenant of the 18th-century complex that replaced the palace was Inland Revenue, Britain's IRS, not a place people wanted to visit unnecessarily. By the late 20th century, Somerset House's grand courtyard had become a parking lot, no draw unless you had a space there. The facade was filthy. Relatively few people knew what lay beyond it.

But by the dawn of the 21st century, this Sleeping Beauty had been awakened. The cars were banished. The courtyard is now the venue for a wide range of concerts — everything from rock to a live relay from Glyndebourne, the great opera festival in Sussex. There are plein-air painting classes for homeless people and children. In winter the courtyard is flooded to make an ice skating rink bigger even than Olympic size. In the warmer months, jets of water arranged in a grid on the stone courtyard floor rise and fall in a most entertaining rhythm. On hot days in summer, young children are allowed to frolic in the spray. This tolerance is all the more remarkable when you consider that Brits would generally rather go on vacation with their dogs than with their children.

In the spirit of the Reduced Shakespeare Company's version of all the Bard's plays whittled down to a manageable 97 minutes, we offer a condensed history of this prime parcel of Thames-side real estate. Here goes:

In the 16th century, Edward Seymour, first Duke of Somerset and brother of Henry VIII's third wife, Jane, built a Renaissance-style palace on the site. Its riverfront location was considered clean and healthy, as opposed to the disease-ridden center of town. Jane died; Seymour was impeached and executed; and the woman who would become Queen Elizabeth I took over. Thereafter, the palace was traditionally allocated to English queens, including the Roman Catholic Henrietta Maria.

"It became a den of popery," says Diana Hansen, director of the Somerset House Trust, feigning disapproval. "It was also the place to be." Henrietta Maria's lifestyle included Catholic Masses — and plenty of merrymaking, which ended when that spoilsport Oliver Cromwell had Henrietta's husband, the hapless Charles I, beheaded. After Cromwell himself died, his body lay in state in the palace. "He refused a crown in life," Hansen says, "but he had a royal funeral."

By the late 18th century the palace was in a state of collapse, replaced, while George III was on the throne, by government offices whose design caused great debate in Parliament. Should the building be plain and functional, or, as an 18th-century guidebook later put it, "a monument of the taste and elegance of His Majesty's reign"? The taste-elegance-and-flat-out-flattery faction won. The result, which took a quarter century to build, was a grand home for the administrative arm of the British Navy and for several learned societies, including The Royal Academy of Arts. The glorious winding staircase in the academy's space is dark at the bottom, and spirals upward to a brilliantly lit top floor where exhibitions were held: The darkness-into-light effect was supposed to be a metaphor for the enlightenment that art brought.

In the early 19th century, the still-unfinished East wing of Somerset House was chosen as the home of King's College, despite protests that it was in a morally reprehensible neighborhood not suited to a school. One critic complained that "It is within about a five-minutes walk of five theaters!" (Nowadays, the number is more like 15. And to see the RSC shatter Shakespeare, you'll have to trudge a good 10 to 15 minutes to the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly Circus.) King's was where research critical to the discovery of DNA took place in 1953. Hansen plans to mark next year's 50th anniversary of that discovery by rearranging the jets of water in the courtyard so they form a double helix.

Somerset House has been heavily restored of late. Much of its Portland stone facade has been scrubbed to reveal an almost pearlescent finish. Examining the exterior sculptures could absorb an infinite amount of time. There are cameos, gargoyles, heroic allegorical figures representing the great rivers of Britain, and modern sculpture: hulking bronzes by the contemporary British artist Tony Cragg on the Embankment side of the complex. The courtyard, with its new cafes and fountains, offers a tranquil oasis in the center of London.

But you won't want to vegetate in the courtyard for long. Somerset House has become a daylong destination. You'll want to check out one of the most dazzling collections of Old Master-through-Impressionist paintings around, along with objects loaned from The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, and a jaw-dropping display of gold and silver objects given to the nation in 1996 by Sir Arthur Gilbert.

The Hermitage Rooms and the Gilbert Collection opened in 2000. The Courtauld Institute of Art has been ensconced in Somerset House since 1990, in the erstwhile headquarters of the Royal Academy, which had decamped to Burlington House on Piccadilly. The institute is named for Samuel Courtauld, a great collector and benefactor who died in 1947. It houses not only the art he owned, but also several other formerly private collections.

The Courtauld's half-dozen interconnected "Fine Rooms" are opulent with murals, ceiling paintings, and ornate plaster work. But they're overshadowed by the art, including signature works by Early Italian painters, Botticelli, Rubens, and a clutch of important Impressionists. A first-time visitor's typical reaction is "That's here?"

Humanity doesn't live on paintings alone. After taking in Cezanne's apples at the Courtauld you may be ready for lunch in one of the Somerset House cafes or, if you're in a more formal mood, in The Admiralty, winner of Time Out's Best New Restaurant award in 2001. Housed in the Thames-side block of the four-sided complex, the restaurant has nautical decor: an armada of ship-shaped crystal and gilt chandeliers; a stuffed crocodile on the wall, presumably a trophy from an aquatic adventure. The restaurant is extremely comfortable, with banquettes and tables not too close together, and the food that chef Morgan Meunier prepares is delectable: tian of two salmons, horseradish cream, smoked eel, beetroot bavarois, apple and cucumber is a great first course.

In the King's Barge House, another part of the complex, is an 18th-century gilded barge that makes you think of Handel's "Water Music."

Each of Somerset House's three museums has its own gift shop, with a notably refined selection of merchandise related to its collections. In the Gilbert Collection shop I bought a pair of slim cylindrical opaque glass vases in a deep amethyst color, each circled by an irregular band of silver leaf. They're very modest, toned-down cousins of the over-the-top objets in the Gilbert Collection itself, including the half dozen gold boxes once owned by Frederick the Great of Prussia, who was so obsessed with these tributes to wretched excess that he amassed a collection of 300 of them. The most flamboyant example in Somerset House is made of gold, mother-of-pearl, lots of diamonds, and flowers and foliage made of semiprecious stones. And what do you put inside such a thing? Snuff. By the 18th century, snuff-sniffing was de rigueur in European courts.

The other treasures in the glittering Gilbert Collection include virtuoso pieces of "pietre dure," objects inlaid with semiprecious stones that form pictures of everything from landscapes to dogs. Then there are the gilded gates Catherine the Great commissioned for a monastery in Kiev, with portraits of saints and swirling flora and fauna.

Speaking of Catherine. A material culture junkie if ever there was one, she returned from a 1764 trip to Berlin with 200 Old Master paintings. She eventually accumulated 4,000 paintings, along with vast quantities of decorative arts, including the engraved gems that were her special passion. She completely stuffed the palace she dubbed the "Hermitage" because it was supposed to be a quiet getaway. By the end of the Soviet era, the Hermitage was a multibillion-dollar fixer-upper, and the government decided to send parts of the collection on the road to generate both awareness and money. Hence the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in Las Vegas. And, at Somerset House, the Hermitage Rooms that display changing exhibitions drawn from the Russian museum's collections.

Among the caches of art Catherine scooped up in toto were the Old Master paintings collected by Sir Robert Walpole, Britain's first prime minister. Mystery and rumor surrounded the 1778-9 sale. The paintings were whisked away to St. Petersburg. When the news came out, Britain was in an uproar summarized in "The European Magazine": The sale was "one of the most striking instances that can be produced of the decline of the empire of Great Britain."

So there's a bit of poetic justice in the current show, "Painting, Passion and Politics: Masterpieces from the Walpole Collection," in Somerset House's Hermitage Rooms until Feb. 23. Most of the works — by Rembrandt, Rubens, and other stars — haven't been shown in England since Catherine took them away. Calling Catherine a "magpie," Diana Hansen jokingly says the show is England's "revenge."