Inigo Jones, perhaps the first and greatest of British architects. The time had not arrived for filling private houses with expensive furniture designed to fit particular niches of rooms, with which it was entirely in keeping. The late Mr. J. H. Pollen, in the Preface to the Catalogue of the Loan Collection of Furniture at Bethnal Green, says ' that he [Inigo Jones] designed furniture is more than probable.' He goes so far as to suggest that a green and white painted hall-chair at Forde Abbey, with an oval back and family crest in the middle, from which radiate flutings, may be attributed to him. 'It is in four boards, three forming the seat, which has a prolongation behind through which the back passes. The front supporting plank has grotesque masks masterly in design.'Some of the furniture at Brympton, near Yeovil, with a scroll which looks like a loose roll with the ends pulled out, Mr. Pollen also suggests was his. These details, however, are such as may be found on Italian chairs, and, though Sir Christopher Wren handed on a tradition that Inigo Jones was apprenticed to a joiner of St. Paul's Churchyard, nothing definite is known at present.

Inigo Jones was born in 1573 in Smithfield, the son of a clothworker. Little is known of the first thirty years of his life, though he is supposed to have been a proficient painter of landscapes. His merit in this respect may have induced the Earl of Arundel or the Earl of Pembroke to send him to Italy, which he visited at the end of the sixteenth century. On his way home he did some work as a draughtsman for Christian, King of Denmark, and returned to England in 1604 with some reputation as a traveller, but none as yet as an architect. Up to 1610, when he was made Surveyor to Henry, Prince of Wales, he was only known as a man of knowledge and resource, ready invention, and versatile capacity. This caused him to be employed as King's Messenger; but, above all, in the designing of the scenery and machinery of that famous series of masques, in which King James and his court took part, which poets such as Ben Jonson wrote, and upon which untold sums of money were dissipated. From 1604 to 1613 Inigo Jones was chiefly employed upon this work.

In 1612, on the death of Prince Henry, he made his second journey to Italy. He stayed there for about a year, collecting works of art for the Earls of Arundel and Pembroke and Lord Danvers, but having as his main object the further study of painting and architecture. This journey, it may be supposed, put the seal upon his reputation as an architect, for in 1615 he was appointed Surveyor-General of the Works to the King, and in the following years was busy with his designs for the enormous projected palace of Whitehall. The Banqueting House, Whitehall, designed in 1619 and completed in 1622, is all that remains and was completed of the splendid scheme. Here is no example of Renaissance classical ornament clapped on to a building whose main lines are still Gothic in shape, but a completely ordered design in the Palladian style. It is to be noted that, though far less classically complete, some of the houses mentioned in the earlier chapter on the Renaissance house were actually built after the Banqueting Hall. Apethorpe dates from 1623, and Stib-bington and Lilford, not previously named, were built in 1625 and 1635 respectively.

Inigo Jones himself completed the Inner Court of Kirby (1572-75) in 1635. In 1635 he was busy with the Queen's House at Greenwich, and in 1647 to 1649 he completed Wilton, with its celebrated double-cube room. He died in 1652.

If we wish to find furniture with the same kind of general form and details as those of Inigo Jones's exterior and interior style we must turn to Italy, whence he obtained his inspiration. Florentine cabinets with miniature palace facades can alone be compared with his elaborate chimneypieces and doorways. His chimneypieces in marble, stone, or oak have interrupted or swan-necked pediments, supported by groups of classical pillars. His brackets are carved with the acanthus, a detail which is common enough on English cabinets and beds.