The Painted Hall: Britain's Sistine Chapel
Why is it significant?
Walk into the Painted Hall and let your eyes climb, because the walls and the ceiling around you are one gigantic painting: gods and monarchs, virtues and vices, sea gods, ships and the signs of the zodiac, all swirling up towards the light.
Key Facts
| Place | The Painted Hall: Britain's Sistine Chapel |
|---|---|
| Address | King William Walk, London SE10 9NN, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.48290, -0.00610 |
| Part of Walk | Under the Thames to Longitude Zero: Maritime Greenwich, London |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk into the Painted Hall and let your eyes climb, because the walls and the ceiling around you are one gigantic painting: gods and monarchs, virtues and vices, sea gods, ships and the signs of the zodiac, all swirling up towards the light. People call it Britain's Sistine Chapel, and for once the cliché is fair.
It was meant to be a dining hall for old and injured sailors. In 1694 Queen Mary the Second founded the Royal Hospital for Seamen here, a sailors' answer to the soldiers' hospital at Chelsea, and Christopher Wren designed it, reputedly without taking a fee. But the hall turned out so grand that it seems the pensioners rarely ate in it at all, and they took their meals in the rooms beneath.
The painter was James Thornhill, later the first English-born artist to be knighted, and the work took him nineteen years, from 1707 to 1726. He was paid by the square yard: three pounds for the ceiling, a single pound for the walls. Find William and Mary enthroned in the heavens of the main ceiling, then the Hanoverian kings who arrived on the throne while he was still up on the scaffolding. And on the far wall of the upper hall, Thornhill painted himself, one hand gesturing towards his work... as if to remind the paymasters how much he had done.
In January 1806 the hall became a place of national mourning. Admiral Lord Nelson, killed at Trafalgar, had been carried home preserved in a cask of spirits, and here he lay in state for three days. Tens of thousands of people queued in the winter cold to file past the coffin. Then it was taken up the river by barge for a state funeral at St Paul's Cathedral.
The sailors' hospital closed in 1869, the Royal Navy trained its officers in these buildings from 1873 until 1998, and a long restoration of the ceiling was completed in 2019. Now cross the Grand Square to the twin dome on the other side. Its interior is the Painted Hall's opposite in almost every way.