Contributions
To the historian, John Thorpe is less a building than a book. The son of Thomas Thorpe, master mason of Kirby Hall, he laid the foundation stone of that family project in 1570, aged five. Having entered the Office of Works as a clerk, he set up as an independent land surveyor, taking surveys for the estates of Anne of Denmark and Prince Henry from 1605, then serving as assistant to the Surveyor-General of Woods south of the Trent. But his fame rests on a single volume: a thick album of plans and elevations of country houses, now kept at Sir John Soane's Museum, which Horace Walpole identified in 1780. He is credited with introducing the corridor to England — "a long Entry through all" — drawn for his Chelsea house in 1597, an innovation that freed each room from the constraint of the continental enfilade. Around his name cluster, by attributions more or less secure, several prodigy houses: Kirby Hall, Condover Hall, Charlton House, Holland House, perhaps Audley End.
Significance
Thorpe is the very figure of the English Renaissance practitioner whose role was long overstated, before criticism returned him to his true and fascinating ambiguity. His album offers the richest surviving graphic record of Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture: without it, whole aspects of what these great houses were would be lost. Yet modern scholarship — led by John Summerson, who catalogued the album in 1966 — has shown that most of these drawings are surveys of finished buildings, not designs, and that it is rash to call him their architect in today's sense. He was long credited with Longleat, built before he was even born. His real importance, then, is not that of a solitary creator but that of a witness, a surveyor and a conveyor of forms, at a time when the profession of architect did not yet exist in England and building remained the joint affair of patron, mason and draughtsman. In this his career illuminates, better than any other, how the great houses of the age were conceived and built.
Influence
His introduction of the corridor lastingly transformed the plan of the English house. His album, studied and published, has become a major source for every historian of Elizabethan architecture and for the modern restoration of houses of the period. He himself was formed on his father's site at Kirby Hall and in the tradition of the master masons, drawing on the Franco-Flemish ornamental repertoire and the continental architectural treatises — Serlio, du Cerceau — that then circulated in English workshops and fed the style of the prodigy houses.
Anecdote
Thorpe's whole career seems sealed by a child's gesture: at five, in 1570, he laid the foundation stone of Kirby Hall beside his master-mason father. The album that bears his name opens, indeed, on a motto playing on his surname — "Thorpe" echoing the old word for a village — to say that he who draws the plans of houses is, in his way, a founder of places. The document nearly vanished: it was Horace Walpole who, in 1780, recognised Thorpe's hand and saved from oblivion the most precious archive of English Renaissance architecture.