Vauxhall Gardens

DAVID COKE, F.S.A.

David Coke is a lecturer with many years' experience. Until 1997, Director of Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, he was a Trustee of the Foundling Museum in London,a Governor of Coram Family and is a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Furniture Makers. As Curator of Gainsborough's House Museum in Suffolk, he organised the exhibition 'The Muses' Bower, Vauxhall Gardens 1728-1786' . He was invited to curate the Vauxhall Gardens section in the 1984 'Rococo' exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and contributed the article on Pleasure Gardens for the 'Oxford Companion to Gardens' (1986).

He is currently completing a history of Vauxhall Gardens to be published by Yale University Press and is included in the NADFAS Directory of lecturers and has just completed a lecture tour of Australia.

1. "The delight of all persons of reputation and taste" Vauxhall Gardens 1661-1859

The extraordinary people, the avant-garde art, the underground music, the expensive food, the exotic architecture, the inexhaustible entertainments, the mindless vandalism and the final tragic destruction following the arrival of the railways.

2. "The Inchanted Palace of a Genie" - Ranelagh, Marylebone, and the other pleasure gardens of Georgian London

Intended as a sequel to no.1, this talk discusses the enormous influence of Vauxhall, and the ingenuity of other entrepreneurs in competing with it. Ranelagh, with its enormous Rotunda, and Marylebone's famous music, fireworks and cakes, are the best known, but there were literally dozens of others spread throughout the capital.

3. The Bishop, his Painter, and the Warrior Queens

The intriguing story of a Tudor Bishop and his relationship with King Henry VIII, as seen through the paintings that the bishop commissioned for an expected visit of the king in the 1520s.

4. Art and Music at the Foundling Hospital

How three giants of the 18th century, William Hogarth, G.F. Handel and Captain Thomas Coram created London's first Foundling Hospital, and how contemporary British artists helped to support it; this talk concentrates on the importance of the Hospital's magnificent art collection in the history of British art, especially in relation to its ground-breaking work for unwanted children.

5. Adventures in Patronage - Commissioning Contemporary Fine Furniture

The thrilling and hugely satisfying process of creating important and beautiful pieces of the cabinet-maker's art, using some of the finest British Designer-Makers working today. The talk outlines the process of commissioning a piece of furniture from a working designer /craftsman. I look at all aspects of this, from the client's initial idea to the craftsman's final realisation of it.

6. The Pleasure Garden and the Orphanage - two unorthodox patrons of the arts in Hogarth's London

The rebirth of a truly British school of painting is normally ascribed to the masterpieces produced in the 1760s and '70s, by artists like Hudson, Gainsborough, West, and Wright of Derby. But none of these would have been possible without two extraordinary arts projects three decades earlier. The sites of both projects are now long demolished, and much of the art has disappeared, but in their day they were the most visible and popular contemporary exhibition spaces in the country.