Banqueting House: London's Best Kept Secret to Re-Open
- Editor OGN Daily
- Oct 28
- 2 min read
In the heart of London's busy Whitehall, the Banqueting House is home to a glorious Rubens ceiling that some compare to Michelangelo's in the Sistine Chapel. After extensive renovation, it is about to re-open.
In 1619, King James I commissioned architect Inigo Jones to create a new, more magnificent Banqueting House on the site of the one which had just burnt down. It was completed three years later, and still stands today. A monument to principles that Jones had imbibed while travelling in Italy - with a hall with dimensions of a double cube (110 feet long, 55 feet high and 55 feet wide), in the manner of ancient Roman buildings.
It is the interior, though, that gives the building its true star quality - specifically the magnificent ceiling by Reubens, commissioned by Charles I in 1629. The spectacular carved and gilded ceiling still contains the nine paintings by Rubens, which were installed in 1636. Peter Paul Rubens was one of Europe’s most influential and important artists, and these vast oil-on-canvas paintings are unique, in that they remain in the very ceiling for which they were first painted.
The three largest paintings depict James uniting the thrones of Scotland and England, ruling his land wisely, like Solomon, and ascending into the heavens, transported by classical gods and goddesses.
Just 13 years after Rubens’ canvas were installed Charles I viewed the ceiling for the last time, as a condemned man. The irony of the divine right of kings cannot have been lost on him as he walked to his death under the magnificent canvases: commissioned as a tribute to his father. The King was executed on a specially built scaffold outside the Banqueting House on 30 January 1649.
