page_title: Pope's villa
section_title: Alexander Pope's villa
hierarchical_section_title: Pope's villa / Alexander Pope's villa
caption_attribution_description: Turner's Popes Villa At Twickenham
context_page_description: Pope's villa was the residence of Alexander Pope at Twickenham, then a village west of London in Middlesex. He moved there in 1719 and created gardens and an underground grotto. The house and grotto were topics of 18th- and 19th-century poetry and art. In about 1845, a neo-Tudor house known as Pope's Villa was built on approximately the same site; it has been used as a school since the early 20th century. Pope's Grotto, which is listed Grade II* by Historic England, survives and is occasionally open to the public.
context_section_description: Alexander Pope moved in 1719 to Twickenham, where many wealthy Londoners had houses. From Thomas Vernon, a local landowner, he  leased a piece of land close to the water on a stretch of the River Thames known as Cross Deep; there were two cottages on the site and Vernon added a third. Pope demolished one cottage and part of a second and employed the architect James Gibbs to create a house in Palladian style, which became known as Pope's villa. He had it extended with a portico by William Kent in 1733.
  Contemporary drawings and paintings of Pope's villa show a fairly conventional classical 18th-century English country house rather than a faithful reproduction or pastiche of a Palladian villa. The house was on three floors, with a central corps de logis of three bays under a hipped roof, flanked by two lower wings of only one bay each with rooves concealed by a closed parapet. The flanking bays had ashlar quoins. The only decoration to the facade consisted of a pedimented window at the centre of the principal floor, and a stone urn at each termination of the closed parapet. An unusual feature of the facade was at its centre on the ground floor—a large elliptical arch with dominating voussoirs. The arch, flanked by small Florentine Renaissance style windows, is redolent of a water entrance to the portico of a Venetian palazzo. Bearing in mind the proximity of Pope's Villa to the River Thames, this resemblance is unlikely to be coincidental. The arch, or portal, was contained in a ground projection of the corps de logis which formed the base for the modest portico, more a porch; asked by Pope for his opinion of this renovation, Lord Burlington wrote that "my friend Kent has done all that can be, considering the place".
  Pope planted a weeping willow on the small piece of land next to the house (a tree trunk in the loggia of the grotto is said to be from this tree or another planted by him), and on about 5 acres (2 ha) across the street now also called Cross Deep, laid out one of the first picturesque gardens. According to Pope himself, the garden included "a Theatre, an Arcade, a Bowling Green, a Grove, and a 'What Not'". After receiving a licence to do so in 1720, he constructed a tunnel leading from under the house to the garden, and branching from this, a Romantic grotto.
  After Pope's death in 1744, the house was acquired by Sir William Stanhope, who enlarged it with the addition of side wings in 1758. He also extended the garden, and built a second tunnel; what remains of this is a Grade II* listed building. Little remains of the garden, but the site was listed Grade II on 1 October 1987 and a brick gazebo is also a Grade II listed building.
  The house remained in Stanhope's family until 1807, when Baroness Howe of Langar (1762–1835) bought it; she had it demolished the following year and built a new house next to the site, and also removed some of the decorations from the grotto and made further changes to the garden. Baroness Howe's house was subsequently partially demolished and the remainder divided into two houses, Ryan House and River Deep.
  Pope's villa and its gardens and grotto were frequently mentioned in poetry and depicted in art. Beginning with Pope's own verse and continuing after his death, "[The house] rapidly ... established itself as the seat of the Muses, and his garden as a model of landscape design." Even more numerous are pictures of the house: although the facade facing the road does not seem to have been depicted, at least 55 drawings, paintings, aquatints, engravings, etchings, and lithographs produced between 1730 and 1888 survive which show the river facade or the grotto. These began with drawings and paintings by Pope himself and his friends and continued with works he may have commissioned (a sketch of the Shell Temple by Kent and a painting by Peter Tillemans from c. 1730) and throughout much of the 19th century. Samuel Scott painted two versions of a view of Pope's villa after Stanhope's additions. When it was demolished, J. M. W. Turner, who was a neighbour, objected; his painting Pope's Vill
caption: Pope's villa at Twickenham by J. M. W. Turner (1808)
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "Turner's Popes Villa At Twickenham...Undated handout photo issued by Sotheby's of JMW Turner's Pope's Villa at Twickenham which has been lost to America to pay the bills at a sprawling castle estate. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Issue date: Tuesday February 10 2009. The 1808 work had been displayed at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire for more than 160 years. But in July the JMW Turner oil painting, which features the home of poet Alexander Pope on the river at Twickenham, was bought at auction by an anonymous American bidder for 5.4 million. See PA story ARTS Turner. Photo credit should read: Sotheby's/PA Wire", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "90", "Image YResolution": "90", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS2 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2009:02:10 15:12:17", "Image Artist": "Sotheby's", "Image ExifOffset": "812", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "950", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4174", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "460", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "288"}