Contributions
A carpenter turned architect, Robert Lyminge was the author of two of the finest Jacobean houses in England. His first documented commission shows him in 1607 in the service of Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, for whom he directed from 1607 to 1612 the design and construction of Hatfield House, the prodigy palace par excellence of the reign of James I. Around 1616-1617 he designed for Sir Henry Hobart a second great house, Blickling Hall in Norfolk, whose building he carried through to the late 1620s. The two share a single signature: red brick dressed with stone around the openings, stone string-courses and quoins, and above all a central clock tower that gives the façade its rhythm — of stone at Hatfield, of wood painted to counterfeit stone at Blickling, a detail that betrays the carpenter beneath the architect. Lyminge was buried in the churchyard at Blickling on 8 January 1628, at the very foot of the house he had raised.
Significance
Lyminge belongs to that pivotal generation in which the working carpenter and mason rose — for lack of architects in the modern sense — to the design of the kingdom's greatest buildings. Hatfield and Blickling rank among the summits of the Jacobean style, that art of transition still mingling the verticality and heraldic fancy of the Elizabethan with a symmetry and order drawn from the Continent, before Inigo Jones imposed classicism. To have conceived and carried through two works of such scale is enough to set Lyminge among the major creators of English architecture before the Civil War. His career also lights up a truth of the age: the author of a prodigy house was not a signing artist but a versatile master-builder, risen from the site, whose name has often reached us through account books and parish registers rather than fame. That he should rest at Blickling, in the shadow of his own work, says better than anything the bodily bond that then joined the builder to what he had built.
Influence
Hatfield and Blickling became models of Jacobean taste, imitated again and again in the brick-and-stone houses of the early seventeenth century. His central clock tower established itself as a signature motif of the prodigy-house façade. He himself came out of the carpenter's trade and inherited the late-Gothic English building tradition, which he married to the Franco-Flemish ornamental repertoire and to Continental motifs — pediments, pilasters, loggias — then spread by engraved pattern-books and by immigrant craftsmen from the Low Countries.
Anecdote
At Blickling the most telling detail is invisible to the eye: the clock tower crowning the façade is not of stone, as at Hatfield, but of wood patiently painted to imitate masonry. There the man gives himself away — a carpenter before he was an architect, who could make timber sing until it passed for stone. And it was at Blickling that he chose to rest: the parish register records his burial in the churchyard on 8 January 1628, a few steps from the walls he had drawn, as if he could not bring himself to leave his last dwelling, in the most literal sense of the word.