Hampton Court Palace in the context of "Bushy Park"

The English Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement in England during the late 15th, 16th and early 17th centuries. It is associated with the pan-European Renaissance that is usually regarded as beginning in Italy in the late 14th century. As in most of the rest of Northern Europe, England saw little of these developments until more than a century later within the Northern Renaissance. Renaissance style and ideas were slow to penetrate England, and the Elizabethan era in the second half of the 16th century is usually regarded as the height of the English Renaissance. Many scholars see its beginnings in the early 16th century during the reign of Henry VIII. Others argue the Renaissance was already present in England in the late 15th century.

The English Renaissance is different from the Italian Renaissance in several ways. The dominant art forms of the English Renaissance were literature and music. Visual arts in the English Renaissance were much less significant than in the Italian Renaissance. The English period began far later than the Italian, which was moving into Mannerism and the Baroque by the 1550s or earlier.

Sir Christopher Wren FRS (/rɛn/; 30 October 1632 [O.S. 20 October] – 8 March 1723 [O.S. 25 February]) was an English architect, astronomer, mathematician and physicist who is one of the most highly acclaimed architects in the history of England. Known for his work in the English Baroque style, he was accorded responsibility for rebuilding 52 churches in the City of London after the Great Fire in 1666, including what is regarded as his masterpiece, St Paul's Cathedral, on Ludgate Hill, completed in 1710.

The principal creative responsibility for a number of the churches is now more commonly attributed to others in his office, especially Nicholas Hawksmoor. Other notable buildings by Wren include the Royal Hospital Chelsea, the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, and the south front of Hampton Court Palace. Educated in Latin and Aristotelian physics at the University of Oxford, Wren was a founder of the Royal Society and served as its president from 1680 to 1682. His scientific work was highly regarded by Isaac Newton and Blaise Pascal.

In English architecture, mainly from the Tudor period onwards, a banqueting house is a separate pavilion-like building reached through the gardens from the main residence, whose use is purely for entertaining, especially eating. Or it may be built on the roof of a main house, as in many 16th-century prodigy houses. It may be raised for additional air or a vista, with a simple kitchen below, as at Hampton Court Palace and Wrest Park, and it may be richly decorated, but it normally contains no bedrooms, and typically a single grand room apart from any service spaces. The design is often ornamental, if not downright fanciful, and some are also follies, as in Paxton's Tower. There are usually plenty of windows, as appreciating the view was a large part of their purpose. Often they are built on a slope, so that from the front, only the door to the main room can be seen; the door to the servants' spaces underneath was hidden at the back (Wrest Park). The Banqueting House, Gibside is an example.

In the English of the period, "banquet" had two distinct meanings: firstly a grand formal celebratory meal (the usual modern sense), but also a course or light meal taken in a special place away from the main dining place, the relevant sense here (Whitehall apart). In large meals a banqueting house was most likely to be used for eating dessert, if reasonably close to the main house. Otherwise it might be used on fine days for taking tea, or any kind of drink, snack or meal.

The Colne is a river and a tributary of the River Thames in England. Just over half its course is in south Hertfordshire. Downstream, it forms the boundary between Buckinghamshire and the London Borough of Hillingdon. The confluence with the River Thames is on the Staines reach (above Penton Hook Lock) at Staines-upon-Thames.

Two of its distributaries, constructed in the 1600 – 1750 period largely for aesthetic reasons for Hampton Court and for Syon Park, have been maintained. Their main purpose was not drinking water but these can be likened to the New River in scale and in date. Crossing its route, many viaducts and a canal, the intersecting Grand Union Canal, have been recognised for pioneering engineering during the Industrial Revolution.

The Triumphs of Caesar are a series of nine large paintings created by the Italian Renaissance artist Andrea Mantegna between 1484 and 1492 for the Gonzaga Ducal Palace, Mantua. They depict a triumphal military parade celebrating the victory of Julius Caesar in the Gallic Wars. Acknowledged from the time of Mantegna as his greatest masterpiece, they remain the most complete pictorial representation of a Roman triumph ever attempted and together they form the world's largest metric area of Italian Renaissance paintings outside Italy.

Acquired by Charles I in 1629, they now form part of the Royal Collection at Hampton Court Palace near London, where they normally occupy a special gallery, with a new continuous frame intended to capture their original setting, mounted into panelling.

Brickwork is masonry produced by a bricklayer, using bricks and mortar. Typically, rows of bricks called courses are laid on top of one another to build up a structure such as a brick wall.

Bricks may be differentiated from blocks by size. For example, in the UK a brick is defined as a unit having dimensions less than 337.5 mm × 225 mm × 112.5 mm (13.3 in × 8.9 in × 4.4 in) and a block is defined as a unit having one or more dimensions greater than the largest possible brick.

Tom Tower is a bell tower in Oxford, England, named after its bell, Great Tom. It stands over Tom Gate, on St Aldates, the main entrance of Christ Church, Oxford, which leads into Tom Quad. This square tower with an octagonal lantern and facetted ogee dome was designed by Christopher Wren and built 1681–82. The strength of Oxford architectural tradition and Christ Church's connection to its founder, Henry VIII, motivated the decision to complete the gatehouse structure, left unfinished by Cardinal Wolsey at the date of his fall from power in 1529, and which had remained roofless since. Wren made a case for working in a Late Gothic style—that it "ought to be Gothick to agree with the Founders worke"—a style that had not been seen in a prominent building for a hundred and fifty years, making Tom Tower a lonely precursor of the Gothic Revival that got underway in the mid-18th century. Wren never came to supervise the structure as it was being erected by the stonemason he had recommended, Christopher Kempster of Burford.

In 1732–34, when William Kent was called upon to make sympathetic reconstruction of the east range of Clock Court in Wolsey's Tudor Hampton Court Palace, he naturally turned to the precedent of Tom Tower for his "central ogee dome with its coronet of pilaster-like gothick finials". The tower of Dunster House at Harvard University is a direct imitation of Tom Tower, though its details have been Georgianised, and stones from Christ Church are installed in one of the house's main entryways.

The Hampton Court Beauties are a series of eight portraits by Sir Godfrey Kneller, commissioned by Queen Mary II, depicting the most glamorous ladies from her court. They adorn the state rooms of King William III at Hampton Court Palace.

They were probably originally commissioned to hang in the "water room" at the palace; however, after his wife's death in 1694, William III moved them to "the eating room downstairs" where they currently hang.

The Windsor Beauties are a set of portrait paintings, still in the Royal Collection, by Sir Peter Lely and his workshop, produced in the early to mid-1660s, that depict ladies of the court of King Charles II, some of whom were his mistresses. The name stems from the original location of the collection, which was at Windsor Castle. In 2024, they were on display at Hampton Court Palace.

A set of copies was commissioned by Robert Spencer, 2nd Earl of Sunderland for his collection at Althorp, and the complete set can still be viewed there in the Picture Gallery, a room he created to show off his adoration for art.