Currently, there is a once in a lifetime chance to climb up and view James Thornhill’s astonishing painted ceiling at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich at close quarters. When you walk into Christopher Wren’s magnificent dining hall, you are confronted with an intricate silver structure of scaffolding filling the space and you ascend the staircase to enter another world. You discover yourself then suspended in the half-light of an arena tinged with a golden hue by the vast painting glowing overhead.
You crane your neck to make sense of the brushstrokes and, from the gloom, faces emerge peering back at you. Out of the depth of the shadows, figures become manifest where there was only miasma upon first glance. You are in the world of the gods and immortals. It is the greatest mixed metaphor in London – here are figures representing rivers and some representing seasons, while others incarnate abstract notions like ‘peace’ and ‘fame.’ And there are portraits of kings and queens, and the astronomer royal, and the first inhabitant of the naval hospital, a bearded gentleman who warms his hands by the fire in the embodiment of ‘winter.’
As you walk around with your eyes cast upwards, new images appear as others vanish generating an unavoidably surrealist experience. It is something like the disorientation of a dream or stumbling through a crowd drunk. There is no reference point to appreciate the relative scale of the figures hurtling towards you from heights above and the unexpected physicality of these larger than life bodies is startling when you find yourself confronted with a huge heaving cleavage or a monstrous pair of buttocks.
Fortunately, there are helpful guides on hand to show you photographs of the entire painting, thus permitting you to fit it all together in your mind and appease the prevailing confusion. They explain that once James Thornhill completed the murals in the dining hall, it was deemed too grand for the retired seaman who were the residents of the hospital and they were shunted off to eat their dinners in the undercroft instead. An alternative theory might be that this phantasmagoric vision with so much gratuitous nudity and chaotic action could hardly be conducive to the digestive process of the superannuated sailors who – at very least – would be in danger of contracting a stiff neck from gazing at the epic panoply overhead rather than contemplating their modest vittles in front of them.
Christopher Wren designed both the Royal Naval Hospital and St Paul’s Cathedral
James Thornhill’s next commission was to paint the interior of the dome at St Paul’s
King William
William & Mary
In 1797, a mischievous painter engraved his name on Queen Mary’s chest
Old Father Thames
Portrait of the first inhabitant of the Royal Naval Hospital in the guise of ‘winter”
John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, and his telescope
Flamsteed’s prediction of an eclipse in April 22nd 1715 was painted here over a year before the event
George I and descendants in the House of Hanover
James Thornhill’s self portrait
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