Copyright (c) 2013 Mathew Jenkins
The device of throwing forward a porch enclosing the main door of the room was employed where the entrance was from a narrow stair-landing, or as an independent means of access between two communicating rooms. The provision of two doors also excluded draughts. An interior porch, a linen-panelled structure with a Gothic cresting, is shown in Holbein's Basel Drawing of the household of Sir Thomas More.
There are examples of inner porches at Cothele, Broughton Castle, Stockton House, Sherborne Castle (where there is a pair in one room), Maxstoke, Bradfield, and Bradninch Manor. By the evidence of drawings, they also existed at Montacute and Evercreech.
In the inner porch of the job room at Brad­ninch, the shafts of the columns which rest upon arcaded bases are carved, and the entablature which breaks forward over them is surmounted by small sculptured figures and a strapwork cresting. The internal porch at Bradfield is also an example of rich close-set Devonshire surface carving and figure-sculpture in relief in the arcaded upper stage.
While minor doors in the early Tudor period which were small and narrow were usually let straight into the wainscot, and when closed, only distinguishable from it by the presence of hinges the door surmounted by the merchant's mark of Nicholas Sotherton is flanked by columns divided by collars into short lengths, enriched with scaling, chevrons, spiral fluting, and "paving".
In important rooms in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century the door became an ornamental feature second only to the chimney-piece, and was often flanked with columns or pilasters, supporting an entablature, or treated even more ambitiously with a composition in which flanking caryatides, or scrolls, obelisks and cresting figured, as in the example from Langton House, Bristol.
As the door was made up of panels, the number of its panels depended upon the size of the panel which was the unit of the wall covering. Where a large composite panel was the unit, the door would be made up of a few such panels; with the smaller panel as the unit, the door would contain six, eight, or nine panels, as in the door in the interior porch of the Abbot's parlour at Thame, or a door formerly at Boughton Malherbe, which has nine panels carved with enriched strap panels. There are instances, however, of the door panels of a larger size and more intricate design than the wainscot panels of the room, as in the doorway of the President's drawing-room, St John's College, Oxford, where two large panels of the door are of rich design, the upper a composite metered panel, the lower containing a faceted boss ; and in Prince Rupert's room, where the door is composed of two large metered panels.
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Mathew Jenkins works with the Woodcarvers Guild preserving the history & finesse of period furnitre and architectural fittings. Would you like to have your own piece of captured history whether it be wall panelling, four poster beds, furniture, etc? Go to http://period-house.org/ for more information and for a free ebook.
http://period-house.org/
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