Why Christopher Wren died thinking his life had been a failure

When Sir Christopher Wren’s servant went to rouse his master from an afternoon nap on 25 February 1723, and found that the old man would never wake again, the reputation of the nation’s greatest architect was already on the wane. He had walked away from St Paul’s in a fit of pique, with the cathedral still unfinished. He had been sacked from the royal post he held for nearly half a century, the surveyor-generalship of the king’s works. And the tide of taste was turning against his brand of restrained baroque in favour of a more rigid Palladianism. In old age he used to grumble that he wished he had stuck to medicine, one of his early interests, instead of dabbling in architecture: then he would have made some real money, he said.

For 100 years after his death Wren’s reputation was caught in limbo between a medieval past and a neoclassical present, his architecture neither picturesque enough for the antiquarians nor scholarly enough for the moderns. In the early 19th century, however, when even the classicists were beginning to tire of dull good manners and Adametic elegance, Wren found a champion in Charles Robert Cockerell, who succeeded to the surveyorship of St Paul’s in 1819. Cockerell developed an unfashionable attachment to the English baroque in general and to Wren in particular: St Paul’s was ‘without a rival in beauty, unity and variety’, St Stephen Walbrook a ‘bubble of unexampled lightness which has stood more than 150 years and not yet blown away’.

Cockerell’s ‘Tribute to the Memory of Sir Christopher Wren’ (1838) was a wonderful capriccio in which he brought Wren’s most famous works (and a few that we now know weren’t his at all) into a single, magical landscape.