9. SECOND EMPIRE AND COGNATE MODES ELSEWHERE…

9. SECOND EMPIRE AND COGNATE MODES ELSEWHERE

IN the cities of Germany and of Northern Europe generally there were in this period no such comprehensive urbanistic developments as in Paris and Vienna. Some individual public monuments are, perhaps, not inferior to those that Napoleon III and Francis Joseph obtained from their architects; but these are rarely grouped into such coherent entities as the Marktplatz in Karlsruhe of the first quarter of the century or the Ludwigstrasse in Munich of the second quarter. The domestic building of the period is also considerably less consistent in character than in Paris and Vienna.

The architectural scene in Germany was overshadowed by the distinguished achievements of the previous period. The Schinkel tradition, although increasingly corrupted, lasted on almost indefinitely not merely in Prussia but in most German states. Stüler, Schinkel’s ablest disciple in Berlin after the death of the short-lived Persius, remained an internationally respected practitioner. He was employed in Sweden and in Hungary, as has been noted, not to speak of German cities, down to his death in 1865. By him and by many others the Rundbogenstil was employed quite as late as in Austria-Hungary both in the various German states and also in the Scandinavian countries. Such a very large and prominent public building as the Berlin Rathaus of 1859-70 by H. F. Waesemann (1813-79) well indicated the long-continued hold of this mode on German officialdom. Nor was this particularly inferior in quality to much similar work produced in the earlier heyday of the Rundbogenstil before 1850. As in Austria, however, alternative modes were growing increasingly popular, even though none rose to a local dominance comparable to that of revived Renaissance in Vienna. The taste of the period for elaboration, both in general composition and in detail, is everywhere evident regardless of the mode employed.

French influence was not absent; indeed, specifically Second Empire features were perhaps more common than in Austria. G. H. Friedrich Hitzig (1811-81), a former assistant of Schinkel’s, had actually studied in Paris. After Stüler, he was the most prominent and successful architect of the period in Berlin, and in the fifties he built a few mansarded houses there. Along the new Viktoriastrasse in the Tiergarten quarter, where he did a great deal of work in 1855-60, one house among the eight that he built was mansarded; the others and most of those he was erecting near by in the Bellevuestrasse, the Stülerstrasse, and other streets at the same time were, however, in a much elaborated Schinkelesque vein. Suburban houses of the sixties occasionally followed Parisian modes also; but far more were clumsy variants of Schinkel’s and Persius’s Italian Villas, or else in some sort of equally clumsy Gothic.

Public buildings in Germany were only occasionally designed in the mansarded mode and, in general, only after the mid sixties. The Baugewerkschule in Stuttgart, built in 1866-70 by Josef von Egle (1818-99) its director, had projecting centre and end pavilions with crudely Parisian detailing. It is curious to realize that it was contemporary with Leins’s belated but rather distinguished Grecian Königsbau there. In Cologne the High School of 1860-2, and the Stadttheater of 1870-2 by Julius Raschdorf (1823-1914), both destroyed in the last War, were heavily mansarded and very plastically modelled; the latter, at least, on which H. Deutz collaborated with Raschdorf, had some real compositional interest in the tight interlocking of the masses (Plate 77B). Despite their very evidently French character, both were considered by contemporaries to be ‘German Renaissance’—as, for that matter, was Wieleman’s Justizpalast in Vienna—because of the specific precedent of much of the detail; German Renaissance was by this time the latest fashion, but to later eyes these buildings in Cologne were no more characteristic examples of it than the one in Vienna. Raschdorf is better known in any case for his much later Neo-Baroque work, notably the Berlin Cathedral, for which he prepared the design in 1888, although it was not built until 1894-1905.

The Military Hospital by F. Heise in Dresden of 1869 was considerably more French in the strong articulation of the mansarded centre and end pavilions and also in its quite Parisian detailing than Raschdorf’s contemporary buildings in Cologne. More prominent in Dresden by far, however, is the Hoftheater, which is not at all French in character. This was designed in 1871 by Semper after his earlier theatre there had been destroyed by fire; its construction was supervised by Semper’s son Manfred after he settled in Vienna, and completed in 1878. Gone was most of the festive grace and delicacy of his Hamburg and Dresden work of the forties, even though the auditorium was not dissimilar to the one that had been destroyed. Yet in the arrangement of the interior and the disposition of the masses this rivals in clarity of organization the opera-houses of Garnier in Paris and of Van der Nüll & Siccardsburg in Vienna. The plans undoubtedly owed a great deal to the elaborate studies Semper had made for Ludwig II in 1865-7 for an opera-house to be built in Munich especially for the production of Wagner’s operas.

The relative importance of Berlin was, of course, rising well before its establishment as the imperial capital in 1871. Friedrich Hitzig’s most considerable public building in Berlin, the Exchange, built in 1859-63 at the same time that the Rathaus was in construction, was neither Schinkelesque nor Rundbogenstil but in a rather academic sort of Late Baroque (Plate 77A). Hitzig seems to have been consciously recalling what Knobelsdorf built for Frederick the Great and thus presaging the more overt Neo-Baroque of the last decades of the century. His later Reichsbank of 1871-6, on the other hand, was in general considerably more Classical despite its banded and diapered walls in two colours of brick.

The public buildings of Martin K. P. Gropius (1824-80) are also indicative of the general stylistic stasis of this period in Germany. His Museum of Decorative Art in Berlin, begun in 1877 and completed in 1881 by Heinrich Schmieden (1835-1913), resembled Hitzig’s houses of the fifties in its Grecian elaboration; it also recalled Klenze’s Hermitage Museum, built more than a generation earlier in Petersburg. Gropius & Schmieden’s still later Gewandhaus in Leipzig of 1880-4, however, is less reminiscent of Schinkel or Klenze and more conventionally academic. This concert hall was renowned for its superb acoustics.

It is easy to forget how much the architects of these decades, apparently obsessed with stylistic elaboration, were also concerned to incorporate in their buildings all sorts of technical advances. Iron may show less than in the previous period, but it was quite consistently used behind the scenes. Central heating, extensive sanitary equipment, vertical transportation, and various other things that are taken for granted today first became accepted necessities in these decades. But it was only in the commercial field—and in England and the United States above all—that such technical innovations influenced architecture very positively or visibly (see Chapter 14), however much they must actually have preoccupied architects who seem today so imitative and retardataire. The Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin by Franz Schwechten (1841-1924), however, built in 1872-80, did represent a real advance over the principal English railway station of this period, St Pancras in London of 1863-76, in the clarity and coherence of its organization. One can hardly say that the shed roof of the Anhalter Bahnhof was in the Rundbogenstil; yet it is much more happily related in scale and shape to the masonry elements of the station than are the two parts of that in London, world-famous nonetheless until the nineties for the unrivalled span of its shed.

Architectural activity in Bavaria was of a very different order. The Ludwigsschlösser,[204] the country palaces that Ludwig II of Bavaria erected for his private delectation after he succeeded Maximilian II in 1864, are the playthings of a monarch mad about Louis XIV. Linderhof, built in 1870-86, revived a local Bavarian sort of Baroque, and was thus even more premonitory of a favourite German mode of the eighties and nineties than Hitzig’s Berlin Exchange (Plate 84). Herrenchiemsee, first projected as early as 1868 but begun only in 1878, is a direct imitation of Versailles. Neuschwanstein, on the other hand, is a wild Wagnerian fantasy of a medieval castle occupying a superb mountain site.

It must be assumed that the architect of the first two, Georg von Dollmann (1830-95), was little more than the draughting agent of his master’s dreams of grandeur. More interesting than the exteriors are the incredibly rich interiors of Linderhof, operatic recreations of the Bavarian Rococo. Appropriately enough these were designed by Franz von Seitz (1817-83), then director of the Munich State Theatre, who was famous for his stage-sets. At Herrenchiemsee, however, many of the interiors were exact copies of the main apartments of Louis XIV at Versailles. These were executed by Julius Hoffmann (1840-96), who began to work under Dollmann in 1880 and succeeded him in 1884. More original were certain other rooms at Herrenchiemsee designed by F. P. Stulberger after 1883 in an even more elaborate and fantastic Neo-Rococo than those by Seitz at Linderhof.

Ludwig II had another obsession besides the majesty of Louis XIV, and that was the genius of Richard Wagner. This cult is almost nauseatingly reflected at Neuschwanstein, for which Riedel, who had built Schloss Berg in 1849-51, prepared the original design in 1867. Construction there began in 1869, was taken over by Dollmann in 1874, and only completed as regards the exterior in 1881; much of the decoration is still later. Despite Ludwig’s romantic love of the real Romanesque of the Wartburg, Neuschwanstein really differs very little from the fake castles of the first half of the century, except in its very ingenious adaptation to a most precarious site. It is the later interiors, designed by Hoffmann in the early eighties, that attempt to realize the Wagnerian legends both in the architectural detailing and in endless murals. The whole culminates in the Byzantinesque throne room of 1885-6 intended by Ludwig to be a sort of ‘Grail Hall’ from Parsifal. The results of his other obsession are more gratifying to the eye.

Never again would any ruler, however, not even in Germany, be so spendthrift a patron of architecture. Considering the deterioration in quality evident in these palaces and castles of the seventies and eighties from the work done for Ludwig’s predecessor Ludwig I or for Frederick William IV of Prussia in the thirties and forties, this was just as well. Fortunately the activities of William II were less related to the building arts; and Hitler, a thwarted architect, had too little time.

Far more typical of the turn German architecture in general was taking in the seventies than the Ludwigsschlösser were such things as the von Tiele house in Berlin by Gustav Ebe (1834-1916) and Julius Benda (1838-97). In its crawlingly rich German Renaissance detail and its irregularly gabled silhouette this prepared the way far more definitely than Raschdorf’s contemporary Cologne buildings for a veritable flood of such coarse work all over Germany in the next decade. This characteristic German mode has analogies with the English style-phase of the seventies and eighties somewhat perversely known as ‘Queen Anne’; more specifically it often resembles very closely what is called ‘Pont Street Dutch’ in England. But leadership comparable to that provided in England by Webb and Shaw was entirely lacking, and even lesser talent of the order of George’s or Collcutt’s (see Chapter 12).

Usually executed in dark-coloured brick with stone trim, this prime manifestation of the bourgeois ambitions of the Bismarckian Empire produced a spate of buildings of all sorts that have come to look very grim indeed with the accumulated smoke of years. Old photographs indicate that many of them once had a certain lightness and even a quite festive air, Wagnerian in the Meistersinger vein rather than in that of the Ring as at Neuschwanstein. But the materials used were always hard and mechanically handled and the execution of the detail at once fussy and metallic. No positive originality in general composition or in planning made up, as with much comparable work in England, for the anti-architectonic character of the basic approach.

A prominent late example is the Rathaus[205] in Hamburg built in 1886-97. This vast and turgid edifice contrasts most unhappily with the suave High Renaissance design of Wimmel & Forsmann’s contiguous Exchange built in the thirties. Its tall tower, moreover, has neither the richness of outline of Scott’s on the Nikolaikirche nor the simple directness of de Chateauneuf’s on the Petrikirche, with both of which it still disputes the central position on the Hamburg skyline.

The nationalistic ‘Meistersinger mode’, so to call it, had only too long a life, lasting well into the twentieth century. But it was early challenged by a new modulation of German taste in the eighties, parallel to that which the English also experienced, towards an eighteenth-century revival—here in Germany definitely Neo-Baroque—of which Linderhof was probably the first really sumptuous and striking example. Ebe & Benda early deserted the German Renaissance for a German Baroque at least as chastened as that of Hitzig’s much earlier Exchange when they built their Palais Mosse in Berlin of 1882-4. In 1882 Paul Wallot (1841-1912), who had also worked earlier in the Meistersinger mode, won the competition for the Reichstag Building with an overpoweringly monumental Neo-Baroque project recalling Vanbrugh more than Bernini or Schlüter. Erected by him in 1884-94, this was soon matched at the inner end of Unter den Linden by Raschdorf’s cathedral.

Unlike Napoleon III and Francis Joseph, the German emperors William I, Frederick I, and William II did not succeed in making their capital an important exemplar of nineteenth-century urbanism. Moreover, the influential position that Germany had occupied in the international world of architecture in the first half of the century was less and less maintained after the death of Stüler. Not until the twentieth century did Germans again make a significant contribution to European architectural history (see Chapter 20).

With the deterioration of German leadership in the seventies and eighties went also a general decline in the architectural standards of the Scandinavian countries that had so successfully based their later Romantic Classicism and their Rundbogenstil on German models of the thirties, forties, and fifties. In Denmark the work of Meldahl was increasingly inferior to that of Herholdt. Although he was only nine years younger than Herholdt, his direction of the Copenhagen Academy, beginning in 1873, coincided with the feeblest and most eclectic period in Danish architecture, from which recovery started only in the nineties with the early work of Martin Nyrop (1849-1925) in Copenhagen and of Hack Kampmann (1856-1920) in Aarhus (see Chapter 24).

A characteristic urbanistic development of the seventies in Copenhagen, the Søtorvet built in 1873-6 by Vilhelm Petersen (1830-1913) and Ferdinand Vilhelm Jensen (1837-90), is French not German in its ultimate inspiration. This grandiose pavilioned and mansarded range of four tall blocks forms a shallow U-shaped square along a canal (Figure 16). Its definitely Second Empire character may not, all the same, have derived directly from Paris but via German or English intermediaries, so much more typical is this of the international than of the truly Parisian mode of the third quarter of the century.

As late as 1893-4 the much more conspicuous Magasin du Nord department store, built by A. C. Jensen (1847-1913) and his partner H. Glaesel in the Kongens Nytorv in Copenhagen, also carried the high mansarded roofs of the new Louvre, both flat-sided and convex-curved, above its end and centre pavilions. The detailing was chastened, however, by memories of local palaces and mansions in the nearby Amalie quarter of the city, where Jensen had worked on the completion of the eighteenth-century Marble Church. The Magasin du Nord thus combines two characteristic aspects of the architecture of the period, evident in most countries but rarely thus joined: a reflection of Napoleon III’s Paris, elsewhere reaching its peak around 1870, and a revival of the style of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, generally beginning about a decade later.

In Sweden also there was some Second Empire influence, although nothing very notable resulted from it. The Jernkontovets Building in Stockholm erected by the brothers Kumlien (A.F., 1833-?; K.H., 1837-97) in 1873-5 has a high mansard and pavilions combined with a respectably academic treatment of the façades that is quite different from the bombast of the Søtorvet. Bern’s Restaurant in Stockholm of 1886 by Åbom, whose more conservative Renaissance Revival theatre of thirty years earlier has been mentioned, is similarly Parisian, particularly in the decorations that were provided by Isaeus.

With I. G. Clason (1856-1930) the tide of eclecticism in Sweden turned more nationalistic. The Northern Renaissance of his Northern Museum, built in 1889-1907, parallels somewhat belatedly the Meistersinger mode in Germany; but it also shows a more refined and delicate touch, somewhat like that of George and of Collcutt in England. As in most other countries, the revival of the native sixteenth-century style was soon succeeded by a revival of the Baroque, here rather academically restrained. This phase is most conspicuously represented in Stockholm by the grouped Parliament House and National Bank of 1897-1905 by Aron Johansson (1860-1936). In the nineties Ferdinand Boberg (1860-1946) was also initiating a new movement somewhat comparable to that led by Nyrop in Denmark (see Chapter 24).

The modes of Second Empire Paris left rather more mark on Holland than did those of the First Empire, particularly in the work of Cornelis Outshoorn (1810-75), whose iron-and-glass Paleis voor Volksvlijt in Amsterdam of the late fifties has been mentioned earlier. That is long gone, but the related Galerij, a U-shaped range of mansarded blocks linked by a sort of veranda of cast iron, till lately bounded the south of the Frederiksplein. His enormous Amstel Hotel, near by on the farther side of the Amstel, was built in 1863-7. At Scheveningen the Oranje Hotel (1872-3), also by him, was one of several typical resort establishments there of an international Second Empire order, as is also his hotel at Berg-en-Dal near Nijmegen (1867-9). Fairly generally high mansards rose in the sixties and seventies over the narrow house-fronts in the new quarters of Dutch cities. However, the opposing Neo-Gothic is more significant historically in Holland, and the secular work of Cuijpers as well as his churches, although rather like Clason’s, is better considered in that connexion (see Chapter 11). As in the Scandinavian countries, the nineties saw new beginnings in Holland, in this case with the appearance of Berlage and Kromhout (see Chapter 20).

The principal Anglo-American developments in the second half of the century were in the specialized fields of domestic and commercial building (see Chapters 14 and 15). England, moreover, had from 1850 to the early seventies a lively stylistic development of her own, the High Victorian Gothic, rather different from the later Neo-Gothic of the Continent, which was also very influential in the Dominions and in the United States (see Chapters 10 and 11). Nevertheless, the international Second Empire mode flourished on both sides of the Atlantic among Anglo-Saxons to a greater extent, perhaps, than anywhere in Europe. It is not, of course, possible to subsume all non-Gothic work of these decades in England under the Second Empire rubric any more than on the Continent. Yet, with certain notable exceptions, the most vigorous and conspicuous buildings of a generically Renaissance character were clearly inspired by Paris, and often specifically by the New Louvre, as Prosper Mérimée noted and wrote to Viollet-le-Duc while on a visit to London in the mid sixties.

The most considerable English public monument built just after the mid century, the Leeds Town Hall of 1855-9, is by Cuthbert Brodrick (Plate 78A). That Brodrick was an architect markedly French in his leanings has already been noted in describing his Leeds Corn Exchange, which is later in date but earlier in style than his Town Hall (see Chapter 4). But this major early work, for which Brodrick won the commission in a competition in 1853, is not easily pigeon-holed stylistically. The great hall inside derives quite directly from Elmes’s in Liverpool, designed almost a quarter of a century earlier, though not opened until 1856. The exterior recalls in its grandiose scale the English Baroque of Vanbrugh more than it does anything that had even been projected since the megalomaniac French projects of the 1790s. The Leeds Town Hall is certainly no longer Romantic Classical, no longer Early Victorian; yet except for the rather clumsy originality of some of the detail and the varied outline of the tower—a late emendation of the original project of 1853—it is hard to say how or why it is so definitely High Victorian, and rather a masterpiece of the High Victorian at that. Wallot in Berlin in the eighties approached Brodrick’s mode of design in the Reichstag but had little of his command of scale or his almost Romantic Classical control of mass.

When Brodrick designed his town hall very little was known in England of Visconti’s project of 1852 for the New Louvre, and Lefuel had not yet begun to elaborate the design. So vigorously individual an architect as Brodrick was hardly likely, moreover, to find inspiration in the Hope house of Dusillion or the Hardwicks’ Great Western Hotel. But the wave of Second Empire influence arrived in England well before the Leeds Town Hall was finished. When the English swarmed to Paris to visit the International Exhibition of 1855 the character of the New Louvre became generally known to architects and to the interested public. The Crimean War in the mid fifties served, moreover, to bring English and French officialdom into close contact. To English ministers and civil servants, even more than to architects and ordinary citizens, the existing governmental accommodations in Whitehall contrasted most unfavourably with those Napoleon III was providing in the New Louvre. When a competition was held in 1856-7 for a new Foreign Office and a new War Office to be built in Whitehall, it is not surprising that most of those entrants who were not convinced Gothicists should have modelled their projects more or less on the work of Visconti and Lefuel.

Barry, the head of the profession, did not enter the competition; but unofficially—for he was still an employee of the Government at the Houses of Parliament—he prepared at this time a comprehensive scheme for the development of the whole length of Whitehall from Parliament Square to Trafalgar Square. In this project he crowned all his façades—including that of his already executed Treasury—with mansards, introduced stepped-back courts like that of the New Louvre, and marked the corners and the centres of the court façades in the most Louvre-like way with pavilions crowned by still taller mansards. Had this project of Barry’s been followed, London would rival Paris and Vienna in the extent, the consistency, and the boldness of her public buildings of this period. In fact, practically nothing ever came of it nor, indeed, of the official competition; for by this period earlier traditions of urbanism had all but completely died out and architectural initiative was largely in private hands.

When the competition was judged in 1857, the designs that received the top prizes both for the War Office and for the Foreign Office were in the pavilioned and mansarded manner; they derived, however, at least as much from the Tuileries as from the New Louvre. It was the rising prestige of Napoleon III, of course, that called public attention at this time to the Tuileries which was his residence—as it had been, for that matter, the residence of earlier nineteenth-century French monarchs. Otherwise no one in England would probably have thought of reviving any of the various periods, covering some four centuries, represented in its conglomerate mass or of emulating its pavilioned and mansarded composition.

Since neither of these projects for ministries was ever executed, and their respective architects—Henry B. Garling (1821-1909), on the one hand, and H. E. Coe (1826-85) and his partner Hofland, on the other—never built much else of consequence, it is not necessary to linger over them. However, their designs and other Second Empire ones that received minor premiums were extensively illustrated in professional and general periodicals, and they provided favourite models in the sixties both in England and in the United States. The Paris originals, on which graphic data was not only scarcer but also less readily accessible, were not on the whole so influential. This helps to explain why French influence appears to have been stronger in the Anglo-Saxon world than on the Continent, even though there was probably less direct contact with Paris.

There was also in England at this time a general tendency, even more notable than in Austria or Germany, to enrich and elaborate plastically the long-established Renaissance Revival mode. This is less specifically inspired by Paris. An excellent example is provided by the extensive range of terraces, designed by Sancton Wood (1814-86) in 1857, that flank Lancaster Gate in the Bayswater Road in London with their boldly projecting bay windows linked by tiers of colonnades. In other examples, such as the National Discount Company’s offices at 65 Cornhill built by the Francis Brothers in 1857, the capping of the whole block with a boldly dormered mansard[206] is more obviously of Second Empire inspiration, though the façades below are merely of a much enriched palazzo order.

When the Moseley Brothers designed in 1858 the vast Westminster Palace Hotel near Westminster Abbey at the foot of Victoria Street, a caravanserai intended to exceed the Hardwicks’ Great Western Hotel of 1850-2 in international luxury, they took over its pavilioned and mansarded design. To judge from the relative dignity and sobriety of their detailing, they would seem to have studied contemporary Parisian work—not the New Louvre but the quieter maisons de rapport along the boulevards—rather than merely basing themselves on the prize-winning Government Offices projects as so many others were content to do at this time. This hotel, which proved a failure, now serves as a block of offices, and has been remodelled almost beyond recognition.

The next year Barry designed the Halifax Town Hall, his last work. He did not himself propose to cap this, like the Government Offices in his Whitehall scheme, with French mansards; those that were executed are an emendation by his son, E. M. Barry, who carried the building to completion in 1862 after his father’s death in 1860. But the richly arcaded articulation of the walls and the emphatic forward breaks of the great tower and of the more modest pavilion at the other end clearly emulate, without directly imitating, the sumptuous plasticity of the New Louvre. Nevertheless, the boldly asymmetrical composition, dominated by a single corner tower, is more in the Italian Villa vein (Plate 78B).

This tower—but not the site—was lined up with the axis of Prince’s Street, which enters Crossley Street at this point. The assured quality of its design and above all that of its tremendous spire, more than worthy of Wren in the ingenuity with which the silhouette of a Gothic steeple was built up out of Renaissance elements, makes the Halifax Town Hall thoroughly English and one of the masterpieces of the High Victorian period. Totally devoid of Gothic elements, it has more Gothic vitality than Barry’s Houses of Parliament, at this time just approaching completion nearly thirty years after they were first designed.

E. M. Barry went on to crown two London station hotels, that at Charing Cross in 1863-4 and that at Cannon Street in 1865-6, with mansards; but these were far from being masterpieces, and that at Charing Cross has lately been much modified. The Grosvenor Hotel, built beside the new Victoria Station in 1859-60 by Sir James T. Knowles (1831-1908), is far more original. He covered the whole enormous mass with a very tall convex mansard, giving further emphasis to the broad pavilions at the ends by carrying their roofs still higher and capping them with lanterns. Beyond this nothing was French. The detail indeed, defined by its architect as ‘Tuscan’, i.e. Rundbogenstil, is highly individual, partaking of the coarse gusto and even somewhat of the naturalism of the most advanced Victorian Gothic foliage carving of the period (see Chapter 10).

Similar mansards, but flat-sided not bulbous, and similar detail characterize a pair of tall terraces that Knowles built in 1860 on the north side of Clapham Common, south of London. These constituted a subtle suburban attack on Early Victorian traditions of terrace-design that soon had metropolitan repercussions. His Thatched House Club in St James’s Street in London of 1865 has a great deal of very rich carving by J. Daymond in the naturalistic vein, but is less interesting in general composition.

Knowles’s Grosvenor was still new when John Giles outbid it with the Langham Hotel, begun in 1864. Given a much finer site than Knowles’s at the base of the broad avenue of Portland Place across from Nash’s All Souls’, Langham Place, Giles rose boldly—most people now think too boldly—to the occasion (Plate 80A). Certainly he overwhelmed Nash’s delicate and ingenious steeple by the rounded projection and the tall square corner tower—now bombed away at the top—with which he faced it. Equally certainly his massive north façade, with its boldly modelled flanking pavilions and its profusion of lively animal carvings, would overwhelm the urbane refinement of the nearby Adam terraces flanking Portland Place had these not by now been replaced by far inferior buildings. For all its gargantuan scale and the somewhat elephantine playfulness of the detail (not to speak of the dinginess to which the ‘Suffolk-white’ brickwork and the stone trim have now been reduced), the Langham is a rich and powerfully plastic composition, most skilfully adapted to a special site, and more original than most of what was produced in the sixties in Paris. The carved animals at the window heads, so varied and so humorous, deserve an attention they rarely receive; these scurrying creatures almost seem to come out of Tenniel, but may actually derive from Viollet-le-Duc.

That this degree of architectural originality, presented with such bold assurance and even bombast, should within a decade or two have come to seem tasteless and actually ugly—as, indeed, it has seemed to many ever since—is not of major historical consequence. The age that achieved it rejected as tasteless and insipid the architectural production of the previous hundred years, and most notably Late Georgian work of the sort to which the Langham stood in close proximity. What is of consequence is that such High Victorian buildings, even when not Gothic, possessed a vitality and a contemporaneity within their period that was very largely lacking in parallel work on the Continent, most of which in any case is a decade or more later in date. In their parvenu brashness, the Grosvenor and Langham balance the contemporary achievement of the Gothic church architects—an achievement generally more acceptable even today as it was already to highbrows and aesthetics in the sixties—without necessarily equalling it (see Chapter 10).

In the English hotel boom of the early and mid sixties which these big London hotels set off, some variant of the anglicized Second Empire became the accepted type of design; indeed, a mansarded French mode continued to be used as late as the nineties[207] for such a big London hotel as the Carlton built by H. L. Florence (1843-1916) in 1897. Many heavily mansarded London hotels of the seventies and eighties are now gone or have been turned, like the earlier Westminster Palace and the Langham, to other uses—among these the former Grand Hotel in Trafalgar Square of 1878-80 by H. Francis and the front block of the former Cecil in the Strand built in 1886 by Perry & Reed may at least be noted here, since they remain so conspicuous and are so exasperatingly unavailable to travellers.

It is a resort hotel, however, the Cliff (now the Grand) at Scarborough in Yorkshire, built by Brodrick at the height of the boom in 1863-7, just before he retired to live in France, that remains internationally the most notable example of the type (Plate 79). And the type could be found in such remote spots as the famous ‘ghost town’ of the Comstock Lode, Virginia City, Nevada, where the large and elaborate hotel is no more, or Leadville, Colorado, where the more modest and much later Vendome Hotel, built by Senator Tabor for his ‘Baby Doe’, is still in use, as well as in big European cities such as Amsterdam, Frankfort, Brussels, and Budapest.

The site of Brodrick’s Grand Hotel is a superb one on the edge of the Scarborough cliffs above the North Sea, as different as possible from the setting of the New Louvre. Its corner pavilions are capped, not with ordinary high mansards, but with curious roofs like pointed domes, richly crowned with elaborate cornices. In the intricacy of their silhouette these are not unworthy rivals of Barry’s Halifax tower. The massive walls are not of freestone in the manner of Paris nor yet of pallid Suffolk brick with light coloured stone or cement trim as in London. Instead, they are of warm red brick with incredibly lush decorative trim of tawny terracotta—a combination that M. D. Wyatt also used on the most elegant Second Empire mansion in London, Alford House, which stood from 1872 until 1955 in Prince’s Gate at the corner of Ennismore Gardens (Plate 83A).

Public and private architecture could hardly hope to rival the sumptuousness of the new hotels, and in Britain rarely attempted to do so. At Liverpool T. H. Wyatt in 1864-9 carried a U-shaped range of ornately pavilioned and mansarded blocks that housed the Exchange around the open space at the rear of the Town Hall, somewhat as Outshoorn carried his Galerij around the Paleis voor Volksvlijt in Amsterdam; but that is now all gone.

In the English countryside, the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle in County Durham, built in 1869-75 by J.-A.-F.-A. Pellechet (1829-1903), and Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire by another French architect, G.-H. Destailleur (1822-93), largely of 1880-3, are unique examples of extensive mansions completely in the Second Empire mode (Plate 76B). In London Montagu House, designed in 1866 by the elderly Burn for the Duke of Buccleuch, once raised in Whitehall the mansarded pavilions that Barry and the winners of the Government Offices competition had proposed in 1857, but this has now been demolished.

The most notable Second Empire ensemble in London, however, still partly survives (Plate 80B). Facing the gardens of Buckingham Palace and extending southward from the group of Late Georgian monuments around Hyde Park Corner, are the terraces of Grosvenor Place. These were designed[208] in 1867 and built in the following years. They provide one of the more striking features of the London skyline inherited from the Victorian period. Rivalling the high roofs and, almost, the tall steeples of the Victorian Gothic, the mansards over the end houses are carried to fantastic heights and capped with pointed upper roofs, providing several storeys of attics; while the centre houses have convex mansards like square domes taken straight from the New Louvre.

Below these Alpine crests, elaborated at the base with rich stone dormers, the enormous houses are all of fine Portland stone—hardly to be found in any earlier nineteenth-century London terraces except those of Ennismore Gardens—and detailed with a plausibly Parisian flair—it is even said that draughtsmen were sent to Paris to study Second Empire work at first hand. English are the porches, however, which make plain that these pretentious ranges are rows of dwellings like those in nearby Belgrave Square. English, also, are the red stone bands, novel touches echoing the fashionable ‘structural polychrome’ of the contemporary Victorian Gothic, just as the tall mansards echo its pointed roofs (see Chapter 10).

Beyond the first two blocks of Grosvenor Place the new construction of the sixties stops; but it starts again at the farther end and surrounds the two triangles of Grosvenor Gardens, of which Knowles’s hotel occupies part of the farther side. It is characteristic of the Parisian inspiration of the whole that on the east side of the Gardens great blocks of flats—’mansions’ in a Victorian euphemism—replaced the usual London terraces of individual tall houses, but these now serve as offices as do all the extant houses in Grosvenor Place. For one of these blocks red brick was used, but set like a mere panel-filling within stone frames according to a French rather than an English tradition.

There are no other comparably pretentious examples of Second Empire terraces in London except Cambridge Gate (1875) by Thomas Archer and A. Green (?-1904), an unhappy intrusion among Nash’s stuccoed Regent’s Park ranges despite its handsome execution in fine ashlar of Bath stone. Characteristically, London domestic architecture of the late fifties and sixties merely elaborated the Renaissance Revival formulas of the previous decade. Not only were the chosen models generally later and richer as in Vienna; wherever possible bolder plastic effects were achieved by a more extensive use of ground-storey colonnades, first-storey porches, and projecting bay windows, as on Wood’s magniloquent terraces at Lancaster Gate or those of 1858 by C. J. Richardson (1800-72) that followed them in Queen’s Gate.

The high standards of the earlier period were maintained only in business palazzi, not those of London’s City, but those in big Northern towns like Bradford and in Scotland. There good freestone was readily available and a certain cultural lag, as well as a regional sobriety of temperament, led to the maintenance of a more Barry-like tradition. Notable everywhere for their academic virtues are the various National Provincial Bank buildings by Barry’s pupil John Gibson (1819-92). The earliest, but not the most typical, is the head office in Bishopsgate, which was begun in 1863.

A special school of Renaissance design is associated with Sir Henry Cole’s Department of Practical Art, and this produced the various buildings that he sponsored in the new London cultural centre in Brompton (now usually called South Kensington). The Exhibition of 1862, on the southern edge of the estate belonging to the Commissioners of the Great Exhibition, was housed in a structure designed by Francis Fowke (1823-65), an army engineer. As at the Paris Exhibition of 1855, the metal and glass construction of this was masked externally with masonry walls, but, unlike Cendrier’s and Viel’s Palais de l’Industrie, the whole was pavilioned and mansarded in the Second Empire mode. A still more elaborate Second Empire project was prepared by Fowke for the Museum of Science and Art (later Victoria and Albert), Cole having evidently accepted all too abjectly the criticism of his earlier temporary structure, the notorious ‘Brompton Boilers’ (see Chapter 7). As Fowke died at this point the Museum (Plate 83B), begun in 1866, as also the associated Royal College of Science (Huxley Building), built in 1868-71, were carried out in a much less French vein under another army engineer, H. G. D. Scott (1822-83). The walling material is a fine smooth red brick, very rare in the London of the nineteenth century, beautifully laid up with thin joints. With this is combined an enormous quantity of elaborately modelled pale cream terracotta, as on various Central European buildings deriving from Schinkel’s Bauakademie in Berlin of 1831-6.

In these South Kensington structures, planned by an engineer, the emphasis is on the sculptural embellishment designed and executed by Godfrey Sykes and other artists associated with the Department. This team-work, by-passing as it did over-all control by an architect, was not very successful in achieving the coherence of Knowles’s and Giles’s hotels, although those were built for much less sophisticated clients. Much the same team, but with still more sculptors collaborating, was responsible for the Albert Hall, the vast circular auditorium built in 1867-71 on the northern edge of the Commissioners’ Estate facing the most characteristic monument of the age, G. G. Scott’s Victorian Gothic Albert Memorial. The engineer Scott’s really notable achievement here in the metal construction of the vast dome is unfortunately swamped by the profuse investiture of sculptural detail in terracotta, intrinsically elegant though much of that is.

In the sixties there was some coherence in the planning of the Commissioners’ Estate as a whole, with a garden court surrounded by a great hemicycle of terracotta arcading by M. D. Wyatt lying behind the 1862 Exhibition Building and below the Albert Hall. In Vienna the cultural edifices were admirably grouped along the Ringstrasse with plenty of open space between them, however much they may have lacked intrinsic architectural quality. In sad contrast is the way the following decades allowed this considerable tract to become clogged up until almost no urbanistic organization at all remains.

Other European countries tended in this period, like Denmark, Sweden, and Holland, to follow Paris and Vienna rather than London. Only a few works of the sixties and seventies need be singled out from the welter of pretentious public and private construction that turned Brussels, for example, into a ‘Little Paris’.[209] The Boulevard Anspach as a whole suggests the Cannebière in Marseilles, although the mansards on the buildings that line it are more plastically handled; the Exchange, in its own square half-way down the boulevard, was built by L.-P. Suys (1823-87) in 1868-73, and this provides the focus of the mid-nineteenth-century city, as does Garnier’s Opéra in Paris. A provincial variant of the Opéra in many ways, despite its quite different function, this is somewhat more academic in composition yet also rather coarser in its profuse ornamentation. Brussels as a whole is dominated, however, by one of the grandest and most original monuments erected anywhere in this period.

The Palace of Justice,[210] built by Joseph Poelaert (1817-79) in 1866-83, occupies so high a site and is mounted on so mountainous a substructure that almost the whole of its gargantuan mass is visible from all over the city. Although generically Classical, a good deal of the external treatment has an indefinable flavour of the monuments of the ancient civilizations of the East, somewhat like that of the exotic churches Alexander Thomson built in the late fifties and sixties in Glasgow (Plate 81). Even more than Thomson’s relatively small and delicately scaled work, the Palace of Justice also suggests the megalomaniac architectural dreams of such a Romantic English painter as John Martin. Heavy and almost literally cruel, it has a Piranesian spatial elaboration and a plastic vitality of the most exaggeratedly architectonic order. Thus it quite puts to shame the urbane Renaissance costuming of most Continental public architecture of this period and the usual Neo-Baroque of the next.

The existence of this extraordinary edifice in a minor European capital prepares one a little for the important part that Brussels was to play in the nineties, even though there could hardly be two architects further apart in spirit than Poelaert and Victor Horta, who initiated there the Art Nouveau (see Chapter 16). So also in Glasgow, the originality of Thomson’s Queen’s Park Church of the sixties at least opened the way for the notable international contribution to be made by the Glaswegian C. R. Mackintosh in the nineties. But it was Alphonse Balat (1818-95), not Poelaert, who was Horta’s master and also in these decades professor of architecture at the local Academy. Balat’s Musée Royale des Beaux Arts of 1875-81 already represents a reversion to a more restrained and academic classicism with none of Poelaert’s force and vitality. Yet this building is not without a certain correct elegance of detail and conventional skill in composition for which his houses of the sixties, with their Barry-like handling of the High Renaissance palazzo theme, prepared the way. The real eclecticism of this period lies less significantly in the variety of nominal styles employed than in the variety of ways of employing them. It is this, rather than the concurrent multiplication of fashionable modes, that makes it so difficult to characterize broadly the production of the period between the mid century and the nineties.

In several other European countries the situation was made even more complicated than in Belgium by a very considerable cultural lag such as has already been noted in Scandinavia. While the Rütschi-Bleuler House in Zurich of 1869-70 by Theodor Geiger (1832-82) had the fashionable Second Empire mansard, here high and concave, at nearby Winterthur Semper’s Town Hall of precisely the same date, with its dominating temple portico, might at first sight be taken for a provincial French public edifice of the second quarter of the century. At the Zurich Polytechnic School, where Semper became a professor in 1855,[211] the large building begun in 1859 that he erected with the local architect Wolff is equally retardataire in style. His Observatory there of 1861-4 is a delicate and rather picturesquely composed exercise in the quattrocento version of the Rundbogenstil, rather like his Hamburg houses of twenty years earlier.

If a German architect of established international reputation could be thus affected by the conservative tastes of his Swiss clients, it is not surprising that in the Iberian peninsula almost nothing of interest was built in this period. It may, however, be mentioned that the building for the National Library and Museums in Madrid, designed in 1866 by Francisco Jareño y Alarcón (1818-92) and almost thirty years in construction, while still of the most conventional Classical character as regards its façades, has convex mansards over the end pavilions of quite definitely Second Empire character. Characteristically, the Chamber of Commerce in Madrid, completed in 1893 by E. M. Repulles y Vargas (1845-1922), illustrates the general return of official architecture to still more conventional academic standards towards the end of the century. But in the seventies there began in Barcelona the career of a Spanish—or more accurately Catalan—architect, Antoni Gaudí, who was destined to produce around 1900 some of the boldest and most original early works of modern architecture. Gaudí’s real links in the seventies and eighties, spiritually if not so much actually, are with the High Victorian Gothic not the Second Empire, although the earliest project on which he worked reflected the Palais Longchamps at Marseilles (see Chapter 11).

The situation in the United States was naturally most like that in England. As has already been noted, a French-trained Danish architect, Lienau, prefigured the Second Empire mode in the Shiff house in New York as early as 1849-50. By the mid fifties mansards of rather modest height, often with shallow concave slopes, had appeared in Eastern cities on many houses not otherwise particularly Frenchified. Richard M. Hunt (1827-95),[212] the first American to study at the École des Beaux-Arts and actually an assistant as well as a pupil of Lefuel, returned from Paris to America in 1855. But he brought with him no lush Second Empire mode but rather the basic academic tradition of the French official world, despite the fact that he had himself worked in 1854 on the New Louvre. Although some of the earliest work of H. H. Richardson, who returned from Paris a decade later after working for several years for Labrouste’s brother Théodore, was of Second Empire character, he showed himself from the first more responsive to influences from contemporary England (see Chapters 11 and 13). On the whole, the Second Empire mode, as it was practised in America through the third quarter of the century, derived almost as completely as the local Victorian Gothic from England. Most American architects were kept informed of what was going on abroad through the English professional Press, and so they naturally followed the models that were offered in the Builder and the Building News rather than those in the publications of César Daly.[213]

The Civil War of 1861-5 did not bring architectural production to a stop; indeed, it seems to have had a less inhibiting effect than the aftermath of the financial crash of 1857 in the immediately preceding years. In Washington the building of Walter’s new wings of the Capitol, initiated in 1851,[214] and of his cast-iron dome, designed in 1855, continued until their completion in 1865, right through the war years at President Lincoln’s express order (Plate 82A). There is nothing specifically French about this new work at the Capitol, even though Walter had the assistance from 1855 of the Paris-trained Hunt. On the other hand, the original more-or-less Romantic Classical edifice that had finally been brought to completion in 1828 by Bulfinch after so many changes of architect was largely submerged. The new wings echo in their academic porticoes the broader portico of the original late eighteenth-century design; but the cast-iron dome (see Chapter 7), rivalling in size the largest Baroque domes of Europe, has a high drum and a Michelangelesque silhouette of the greatest boldness in contrast to the Roman saucer shape of that designed by Latrobe and not much raised in execution by Bulfinch.

It was not in Washington that the Second Empire mode was first introduced for public buildings; Washington, indeed, would never again be the centre of architectural influence that it was in the Romantic Classical period, although the new state capitols begun in the sixties and seventies were mostly capped with imitations of Walter’s dome. A ‘female seminary’ on the Hudson River, endowed by a brewer, and the new City Hall in Boston, Mass., both dating from the opening of the sixties, are the first monumental instances of the new mode that dominated the field of secular public building until the financial Panic of 1873 brought the post-war boom to a close. James Renwick,[215] who designed the very extensive Main Hall for Matthew Vassar’s new college at Arlington near Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1860, was specifically instructed by his client to imitate the Tuileries—not the New Louvre—and so he did in an elaborately pavilioned composition of U-shaped plan crowned by various sorts of high mansards. This overshadows in significance his earlier Charity Hospital of 1858 on Blackwell’s Island in New York, already mansarded but very plain, and his Corcoran Gallery of 1859, now the Court of Claims, in Washington, with a rich but muddled façade still rather flatly conceived.

Renwick was at least as eclectic as such Europeans as Ballu and Ferstel. Having made his first reputation with the building of the Anglican Grace Church in New York in 1843-6—if not very Camdenian, this is at least a fair specimen of revived fourteenth-century English Gothic—he continued in the Gothic line with the Catholic St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, begun in 1859 and completed (except for the spires) in 1879. That vast two-towered pile, however, is Gothic in a very Continental way, resembling Gau’s and Ballu’s Sainte-Clotilde in Paris and Ferstel’s Votivkirche in Vienna more than anything English of the period. In the late forties Renwick had also been the agent of Robert Dale Owen’s ‘Romanesque Revival’ aspirations in designing the Smithsonian Institution in Washington (see Chapter 6).

For such things as the Smithsonian and his churches Renwick had plenty of visual documents on which to lean, either archaeological treatises on the buildings of the medieval past or illustrations of contemporary foreign work. But for Vassar College, very evidently, he was dependent for his inspiration on rather generalized lithographic or engraved views of the Tuileries. Nor could he, at this relatively early date, borrow much from published illustrations of contemporary English work in the new international Second Empire mode. The particular plastic vitality of the Americanized Second Empire is already notable in this early example, however, even though the rather crude articulation of the red brick walls is remote from anything French of any period from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. Later buildings by Renwick in the same mode are richer and closer to Parisian standards, but their architectonic vitality is considerably less.

The Boston City Hall,[216] built by G. J. F. Bryant (1816-99) and Arthur D. Gilman (1821-82) in 1862-5, is a smaller but suaver edifice. Although it is a compactly planned block, the articulation of the walls by successive Roman-arched orders, coldly but competently executed in stone, is boldly plastic below the crowning mansards. However, just before this, for the Arlington Street Church of 1859-61, the first edifice erected in the Back Bay district that Gilman was just laying out,[217] he had turned not to France but to eighteenth-century England for inspiration, basing himself chiefly on the same churches by Gibbs that had been the most popular American models in later Colonial times.

A leading opponent of the Greek Revival, Gilman, like most Continental architects of the day, evidently knew better what he meant to leave behind than whither he wished to proceed. His Boston church initiated no national wave of Gibbsian church architecture; indeed, the sixties were the heyday of Victorian Gothic design for churches in the United States. His City Hall, on the other hand, set off a nation-wide programme of public building in the Second Empire mode; for Boston was now for a score of years the artistic as well as the intellectual headquarters of the country in succession to Philadelphia. In this programme municipalities, state authorities, and the Federal Government all participated actively during the decade following the Civil War. In the case of many Federal buildings, only nominally the work of the office of the Supervising Architect, where A. B. Mullet (1834-90) succeeded Rogers in 1865, Gilman acted in these years as consultant, and was probably the real designer rather than Mullet or his assistants.

These vast monuments were mostly constructed during General Grant’s presidency. Parisian in intention, yet American in their materials, they are withal rather similar to Second Empire work in England. Few were completed before the mode went out of favour as changes in architectural control sometimes make evident. In the case of the New York State Capitol in Albany, for example, begun in 1868 by Thomas Fuller (1822-98) and his partner Augustus Laver (1834-98), both arriving from England via Canada, Eidlitz and Richardson took over jointly in 1875, modifying the design of the building very notably above the lower storeys towards the Romanesquoid. Thus it was finally brought to completion by them and others in the following twenty years. The very tall tower on the Philadelphia City Hall, begun in 1874, was finished over a decade later. This tower, whose crowning statue of William Penn still tops the local skyline, has hardly anything in common with the Louvre-like pavilions below; yet the whole is nominally the work of one architect, John McArthur, Jr (1823-90), the grandfather of General Douglas McArthur.

Undoubtedly the association of these prominent buildings with the unsavoury Grant administration and the fact that there were—at least in the two cases mentioned above—major financial scandals involved in their slow and incredibly costly construction played an important part in the early rejection of a mode so associated with the public vices of the decade after the Civil War. Not many of them are extant today other than the Boston, Albany, and Philadelphia structures just mentioned and the old State Department Building in Washington (Plate 82B).

In New York, Boston, and other large cities the vast granite piles in this mode that long served as post offices are all gone. In Chicago the Cook County Buildings built by J. J. Egan in 1872-5 have also long since been replaced. In San Francisco Fuller & Laver’s extensive group of Municipal Buildings was destroyed in the fire that followed the earthquake of 1906. This must have been the largest, the richest, and plastically the most complex production of the whole lot, with its triangular site, boldly articulated massing, and central dome.

Though threatened by every new administration, the State, War and Navy Department Building built by Mullet in 1871-5 still stands, overshadowing the nearby White House. This is perhaps the best extant example in America of the Second Empire—or as it is sometimes called locally, the ‘General Grant’—mode (Plate 82B). The tiers of Roman-arched orders in fine grey granite, borrowed by Gilman as consultant architect and presumptive designer from his earlier Boston City Hall rather than from Paris, tower up storey above storey to carry mansards of various different heights above the complex pavilioned plan. Cold and grand, almost without sculptural decoration, this could hardly be less like the New Louvre or the old Tuileries in general texture; nor is there any of the playful semi-Gothic detail of Knowles’s and Giles’s London hotels or of the festive colouring and lush ornamentation of Brodrick’s at Scarborough.

The contrast of the old State Department Building with its pendant on the other side of Lafayette Square, Mills’s Grecian Treasury, finally completed by Rogers a decade earlier, is shocking to most people. Yet it is fascinating to read here the representational aspirations of an age that found its most significant expression, not in its public buildings, but in the new skyscrapers which first rose in New York at just this time, Hunt’s Tribune Building and the Western Union Building by his pupil George B. Post. Both, incidentally, were heavily mansarded, and the one by the American-trained Post was much more typically Second Empire than is the French-trained Hunt’s (see Chapter 14).

In urban domestic architecture, both on large mansions and on the more usual terrace houses, mansards became characteristic but not ubiquitous in the late fifties and remained so down to the mid seventies and even later in the West. Boston’s Back Bay district, laid out by Gilman in 1859, has a few mansions along Commonwealth Avenue that resemble somewhat the hôtels particuliers of Paris, and also several mansarded terraces by Bryant & Gilman and other architects in that avenue and in Arlington and Beacon Streets. The materials used are un-Parisian—brownstone like Gilman’s nearby church or dark-red brick with brownstone trim—and the detail is rarely very plausibly French. In general, inspiration still came from London, even if nothing so extensive and spectacularly monumental as Grosvenor Place and Grosvenor Gardens was ever produced. In New York Lienau’s finest terrace, that built in Fifth Avenue between 55th and 56th Streets in 1869, was rather more sumptuous than the Boston examples, being of white marble with very literate ranges of superposed orders. Hunt’s New York work was often so authentically Parisian as quite to lack the bombast of the international Second Empire mode. Especially interesting were his Stuyvesant Flats in 18th Street, New York, of 1869-70. This block was a very early example of an apartment house of the Parisian sort in America, where they did not generally flourish much before the late eighties.

For the more characteristic free-standing houses that were built outside cities, in suburbs, in towns, and even in the country, the Second Empire mode was also very popular. Interpreted in wood, painted brown or grey stone colours, these have a distinctly autochthonous character. Generally symmetrical and tightly planned, they did not advance the development of the American house in the way of the rival ‘Stick Style’; but in their emphasis on complicated three-dimensional modelling, especially the modelling of the roofs, they prepared the way for one important aspect of the later and more original ‘Shingle Style’ (see Chapter 15).

The Second Empire episode in the United States is a curious one. On the one hand, it was a consciously ‘modern’ movement, deriving its prestige from contemporary Paris, not from any period of the past like the Greek, the Gothic, or even the Renaissance Revivals—of which last, of course, it was in some limited sense an heir. On the other hand, the considerable originality of the mode as it was actually employed was largely unconscious and due to the lack of accurate visual documents, or even a codified body of precedent, to be followed. At this time contemporary conditions demanded, as in Europe, the construction of many public edifices, Federal, state, and municipal, to house a complexity of functions. It would have been almost impossible to compress these within the rigid rectangles of the Greek Revival even had the Greek Revival not already been rejected by most critics twenty years or more earlier.

Yet the Second Empire episode was necessarily brief, lasting little more than a decade. The crass assurance it reflected, particularly the special arrogance of the post-war politicians in Washington, the state capitals, and in the bigger cities, was much shaken by the Panic of 1873. The mode did not therefore, as in much of Europe, continue in America into the eighties and nineties.

The episode has a longer-term significance, nevertheless. Slight as was the actual relationship to the Second Empire mode of the first two Americans to be trained at the École des Beaux Arts, Hunt and Richardson, their personal influence and their prestige encouraged a growing trek of architectural students to Paris; their recommendations alone would hardly have had much effect had not fashion already established Paris rather than London in the public mind as the centre of modern architectural achievement and inspiration. From the mid eighties on, the long-maintained dependence on England in architectural matters began to be notably weakened; for a generation and more very many American architects would seek their roots abroad, but henceforth in France, or even Italy, not England.

It is not surprising that in the British Dominions there was no such direct French influence in this period as in Latin America. Urban entities like the Colmena and its terminal square in Lima, Peru, pavilioned and mansarded throughout, rival European examples like the Søtorvet in Copenhagen or the Galerij in Amsterdam. Before they gave way to skyscrapers, the hôtels particuliers along the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City were more numerous and more plausibly Parisian than along Commonwealth Avenue in Boston or Bellevue Avenue at Newport. But both in Canada and in Australia the Second Empire mode arrived from England late and in a more corrupted form than in America. The mansarded Windsor Hotel of 1878 in Montreal hardly rivalled the Palmer House of 1872 in Chicago by J. M. Van Osdel (1811-91), to which the rich merchant Potter Palmer was as proud to give his name as to the incredible fake castle that he built for his own occupancy a decade later. The Princess Theatre in Melbourne, Australia, built by William Pitt in 1877, with its three square-domed mansards, has an appealing nonchalance, like that of the contemporary edifices of the mining towns high in the American Rocky Mountains—the hotel in Virginia City, Nevada, that has been mentioned earlier, or the much more modest Opera House in Central City, Colorado, for example. But the public architecture of the third quarter of the century in Australia was more restrained in design just because it was generally so very retardataire.

The Parliament House in Melbourne, begun in 1856 by John G. Knight (1824-92) and completed in 1880 by Peter Kerr (1820-1912), has academic virtues not unworthy of Kerr’s master Barry, though its giant colonnades recall rather those of Brodrick’s contemporary Town Hall in Leeds. The Treasury Buildings in Melbourne, by John James Clark (1838-1915) of 1857-8, are not unworthy of comparison with High Renaissance work of the period on the Continent. Other public buildings of the sixties and seventies are of more definitely Victorian character, but Early Victorian rather than High. For example, Clark’s Government House of 1872-6 in South Melbourne is a towered Italian Villa consciously modelled on Queen Victoria’s Osborne House of a generation earlier. Both in Australia and in Canada the Victorian Gothic had more vitality in this period (see Chapter 11).

There is little profit in pursuing farther in the outlying areas of the western world evidence of direct influence from Paris (of which there is, for example, some in Russia) or autochthonous variants of the Second Empire mode. In this generally rather unrewarding period the best work mostly falls under the High Victorian Gothic rubric, or else it illustrates specifically the development of commercial and domestic architecture in the Anglo-American world (see Chapters 10 and 11; 14 and 15). In an attempt to give an over-all picture too many buildings of low intrinsic quality and little present-day interest have already been cited.

What makes especially difficult the proper historical assessment of the widespread influence of Paris in the decades following 1850 is that this influence, whether direct or indirect, rarely produced buildings on the Continent of real distinction or even of much vitality. Only in England and the United States, where the mode was quite reshaped by a different cultural situation and the bold use of local materials, is it of much independent interest. The more plausibly Parisian the work outside France, the less vigour it usually possesses. Some of it can be very plausible indeed, as for example the street architecture of Mexico City and Buenos Aires, even if what appears to be carved French limestone in the Argentine capital is usually but a triumph of imitative craftsmanship on the part of stucco-workers imported from Italy. In general, Mexican and Argentine Second Empire is very dull, as dull as in Belgium, say, with no Poelaerts to redress the balance. Yet along the Malecón in Havana, Cuba, where the traditional galleried house-fronts were reinterpreted in a generically Second Empire way with Andalusian lushness, the results are much more notable, not least because the soft local stone has been very richly weathered by the strong sea breeze. As was mentioned earlier, the use of azulejos in extraordinary tones of brilliant green and purple gives autochthonous character to similar work in Brazil.

The international Second Empire mode has so far found no historian or even a sympathetic critic. Perhaps no other mode so widespread in its acceptance and so prolific in its production has ever received so little attention from posterity. Yet beside it the contemporary stream of the Victorian Gothic mode, which has been recurrently studied, must seem more than a little parochial and also excessively dependent on the individual capacities—not to say the caprices—of its leading practitioners. Within the areas in which the Victorian Gothic was employed, however, an area effectively confined to the Anglo-Saxon world geographically and to certain kinds of buildings typologically, it was capable of major architectural achievement. Moreover, thanks to the line of spiritual descent from the leaders of the generation of architects active in the third quarter of the century to those of the next, the more creative aspects of the architecture of the turn of the century derive in not inconsiderable part from the later Victorian Gothic.

The Lefuels and Hansens, or such men as Brodrick, Poelaert, and Gilman, trained no worthy pupils. But the disciples of the Victorian Gothic leaders not only include such very able young men who actually worked in their offices as Webb and Shaw and Voysey but also, in some sense at least, so great an American architect as Richardson, whose formal training had been wholly Parisian (see Chapters 11, 12, and 13). The advance of domestic architecture in the second half of the nineteenth century and, to a somewhat lesser extent, also that of commercial architecture therefore owed a great deal to the Victorian Gothic, at least in England and America (see Chapters 14 and 15).

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10. HIGH VICTORIAN GOTHIC IN ENGLAND

BY 1850 Neo-Gothic was accepted as a proper mode for churches throughout the western world. Only in England, however, had it become dominant for such use. Moreover, Gothic was a more than acceptable alternative there to Greek or Renaissance or Jacobethan design for many other sorts of buildings also. Only in the urban fields of commercial construction and of terrace-housing was its employment still very rare. On the Continent the nearest equivalent in popularity and ubiquity to the Victorian Gothic was the German Rundbogenstil. Neo-Gothic, although used more and more everywhere after 1850 for churches, attracted few architectural talents of a high order (see Chapter 11).

There are several reasons why the Gothic Revival was able in England, and almost only in England, to pass into a new and creative phase around 1850. One was certainly the ethical emphasis of its doctrines, an emphasis more sympathetic to Victorians than to most Europeans of this period, but not without its appeal on the Continent towards the end of the century. Another reason was the informality, not to say the amateurishness, of architectural education in Britain, encouraging personal discipleship and the cultivation of individual expression rather than providing for the continuation of an academic tradition.

Related to this is the private character of architectural practice in England as compared to its more public responsibilities and controls on the Continent. The desirable professional positions in France, and to almost the same degree in many other European countries, were those offered by the sovereign or the State. But after the time of Soane and Nash official employment ceased to carry either prestige or opportunity in England, the Houses of Parliament notwithstanding—it was not Barry’s work there but his clubs and mansions that established his high professional reputation. As in the eighteenth century, a social and aesthetic élite still provided both critical esteem and the most desirable commissions for Victorian architects; by 1850 a large part of that élite was very church-minded and thoroughly Gothicized. Not until the mid sixties was there any significant change; even then those responsible for this change, both the architects and their patrons, had all been brought up in the churchly Gothic Revival tradition.

The High Victorian Gothic opened with the building of a London church. All Saints’, Margaret Street, designed in 1849, largely completed externally by 1852, and consecrated in 1859, was the result of no imperial fiat, like the Votivkirche in Vienna or the big churches of the sixties in Paris, nor did it occupy like them an isolated site approached by wide new boulevards. Intended as a ‘model’ church by its sponsors, the Ecclesiological Society, and financed by private individuals, All Saints’ is set in a minor West End street at the rear of a restricted court flanked by a clergy house and a school (Plate 6A). But for its tower, the tallest feature of the mid-century London skyline, it would have been hard to find; but once found, it could never be ignored.

The architect of All Saints’, Butterfield, had been for some years, together with Carpenter, the favourite of the ecclesiologists because of the Pugin-like ‘correctness’ of his revived fourteenth-century English Gothic. Now, quite suddenly, he and his sponsors embarked on new paths. As soon as the walls began to rise, their startling character became apparent; for the church is of red brick, a material long out of use in London, and that red brick is banded and patterned with black brick, a theme varied on the tower by the insertion of broad bands of stone. ‘Permanent polychrome’, achieved with a variety of materials, thus made its debut here. In the interior, moreover, the polychromatic effect was even richer and more strident, with marquetry of marble and tile in the spandrels of the nave arcade and over the chancel arch, not to speak of onyx and gilding in the chancel itself (Plate 85). The very exiguous site forced any expansion upwards; the nave is tall, the vaulted chancel taller, and the subsidiary structures flanking the court are even higher and narrower in their proportions.

While the construction of All Saints’ proceeded there was much concurrent and complementary activity in the English architectural world. In 1849 a young critic, John Ruskin (1819-1900), had brought out an influential book, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, in which many of the recommendations ran parallel to, if indeed they did not influence, Butterfield’s latest stylistic innovations. Notably, Ruskin urged the study of Italian Gothic: if All Saints’ is, in fact, not specifically Italian in the character of its polychromy, it seemed so to most contemporaries. The real foreign influences here, as in the profile of the fine plain steeple, are German if anything. Butterfield’s moulded detail continued to follow quite closely English fourteenth-century models.[218]

In this same year 1849 Wild[219] was building on an even more obscure London site in Soho his St Martin’s Northern Schools with pointed arcades of brick definitely derived from Italian models. Moreover, he was being acclaimed for doing this by the very ecclesiological leaders who had ten years before condemned his Christ Church, Streatham, as ‘Saracenic’. With the publication of the first volume of Ruskin’s next book, The Stones of Venice, in 1851 (the two less important later volumes came out in 1853) and the appearance of Brick and Marble Architecture of the Middle Ages in Italy by G. E. Street (1824-81) in 1855, Italian influence increased. Street’s name, moreover, introduces the third of the three men most responsible for the sharp turn that English architecture was taking in the fifties.

Without depending on polychromy, Butterfield designed in 1850 and built in 1851-2 St Matthias’s off Howard Road in Stoke Newington, a London suburb, another church of novel character. Unconfined by a closed-in urban site, this also showed in its great scale and the bold silhouette of the gable-roofed tower—still standing today above the bombed ruin of the church—how the timid Early Victorian Gothic of the forties could be invigorated. Moreover, at St Bartholomew’s at Yealmpton in Devonshire, built in 1850, Butterfield introduced in a country church striped piers of two different tones of marble and considerable coloured marquetry work. A former fellow assistant of Street in G. G. Scott’s office, William H. White (1826-90), at All Saints’ in Talbot Road, Kensington, in London, begun in 1850, also used the new polychromy that soon became the principal, though by no means the only, hallmark of High Victorian Gothic.

A large country house of stone by S. S. Teulon (1812-73), Tortworth Court in Gloucestershire, built in 1849-53, has no polychromy, although its architect was soon to be the most unrestrained of all in its exploitation. His patrons, moreover, would be notably ‘lower’ in their churchmanship than the members of the Ecclesiological Society who employed Butterfield. But in the boldly plastic massing of Tortworth, leading up to a tall central tower of the most complex silhouette, Teulon exemplified the new architectural ambitions, ambitions that would soon be finding as striking expression in secular work as in ecclesiastical building whether ‘high’ or ‘low’.

Street had been a favourite of the High Church party since he first began building small churches and schools of a most ‘correct’ sort in Cornwall on leaving Scott’s office.[220] He was also the author of several critical articles published in The Ecclesiologist, notable for their cogency. In these he commented, for example, on the applicability of the arcades of Wild’s school to commercial building; he also attacked the curious habit of the forties, most prevalent with the ecclesiologists, of designing urban churches on confined sites as if they were to sprawl over ample village greens. Street began his first important church with associated school buildings, All Saints’, Boyn Hill, at Maidenhead, in 1853. Here he employed red brick and almost as much permanent polychrome as Butterfield at All Saints’, Margaret Street. He also handled the detail, particularly on the schools, with something of the same sort of brutal ‘realism’ (to use the catchword of the period) that Butterfield used on his subsidiary buildings.

In the same year in London Street’s former employer Scott, long established as the most successful, if hardly the most ‘correct’, of Early Victorian Gothic practitioners, and since 1849 Architect to Westminster Abbey, built in Broad Sanctuary contiguous to the façade of the Abbey a Gothic terrace. That the use of Gothic should have been encouraged here by the Abbey authorities is not surprising. But they themselves may well have been surprised at what their architect produced; for this is no flat range of Neo-Tudor fronts in stock brick, but a plastic mass of stonework bristling with oriels and turrets and capped with a broken skyline of stepped gables. Nothing here recalls the rather French thirteenth-century Gothic of the Abbey itself; instead the effect is Germanic, recalling the medieval houses of the Hansa cities. The work was executed with a boldness of detail doubtless less personal in character than Butterfield’s or Street’s, but quite as striking to the casual observer.

Scott’s houses had little influence, however. Gothic terraces were no more popular in the fifties and sixties in England than in the preceding decades. In residential districts the flood of more-or-less Renaissance stucco continued to spread, little affected by the High Victorian Gothic. As we have seen, the Second Empire mode also had only a very limited success in this field of construction, a field dominated not by architects but by builders.

In 1853 also Scott provided for the Camden Church in the Peckham Road in South London—Ruskin’s own family church—a new east end in a round-arched and banded medievalizing mode; Ruskin himself collaborated on the window design, or so it is said. There is sufficient Gothic ‘realism’ in the detail here to justify considering this a round-arched variant of the High Victorian Gothic; but it is definitely of Italian inspiration. It seems also to be related to the later Rundbogenstil of this decade in Germany and Austria; nor is it altogether without resemblance to such a contemporary French church as Vaudoyer’s Byzantinesque cathedral of Marseilles.

Several far more important and better publicized interventions in architecture on the part of Ruskin followed immediately. In considerable part because of his personal influence with Oxford friends, the Gothic design of the Irish architects Sir Thomas Deane[221] (1792-1871) and Benjamin Woodward (1815-61) was accepted for the University Museum at Oxford in 1855. Woodward had already proved himself a would-be Ruskinian in detailing their design of 1853 for the Museum of Trinity College, Dublin, in a Venetian (though largely quattrocento) way. As the Oxford Museum rose to completion in the next four years, Ruskin was in continuous contact with Woodward, providing himself the design for at least one window as well as encouraging the delegation to the Irish carvers of much of the responsibility for the ornamental decoration—of which only a small part was, in fact, ever executed. The work of the O’Sheas is better appreciated in Dublin, where the decoration both of the Trinity College building and of the Kildare Street Club of 1861 was carried out by them in a very free and yet boldly naturalistic vein.

The most interesting feature of the University Museum—and one that it is surprising to find Ruskin, who hated iron and all it stood for in the nineteenth-century world, involved with—is the court, with its roof of iron and glass (Plate 86B). How different this is, however, from what iron-founders without architectural control were providing at the same time in the Brompton Boilers! Yet it is even more different from Hopper’s or Rickman’s iron Gothic of fifty years earlier (Plate 60B). For all the elaboration of the ornament, which is very metallic in character but also very aware of Early Gothic precedent, what is most notable is the highly articulated character of the structure, as if the architects had asked themselves: ‘How would medieval builders have used structural iron had it been readily available to them?’ Is this, perhaps, the first echo in England of the theories of Viollet-le-Duc, the French architect who was to exercise an international influence equal to Ruskin’s over the next generation? Probably not, as his own enthusiasm for iron began only rather later (see Chapter 16). Whether or not there is specific influence from Viollet-le-Duc here, his great archaeological publication, the Dictionnaire raisonné,[222] had begun to appear the year before. Very soon the structural expressiveness of ‘Early French’ detailing, studied by English architects at first hand as well as in the woodcuts of the Dictionnaire, began to supplant Italian polychromy as the hallmark of advanced fashion in the higher aesthetic circles.

A more modest Oxford building by Deane & Woodward, the Union Debating Hall of 1856-7, has more vigour on the whole than does the Museum, particularly in its characteristically notched brick detailing. It also has the advantage of murals by the young Pre-Raphaelites. One of these, who had just left Street’s architectural office to turn briefly to painting, was William Morris (1834-96).[223] His ceiling here initiated the most distinguished career of architectural decoration of the second half of the century. Morris as a critical writer was destined, moreover, to be at least as influential on later architecture as Ruskin or Viollet-le-Duc.

Of the same date, 1856, is perhaps the most successful of Butterfield’s extant churches, that at Baldersby St James near Beverley in Yorkshire, with its contiguous group of vicarage, schools, and cottages. All of stone externally, the polychromy here is rather a sort of ‘poly-texture’ most effectively handled in the banding of the tall pyramidal spire above the plain square tower (Plate 87). Internally a delicate harmony of pink and grey-blue bricks, with accents of creamy stone, replaces the acid chords of All Saints’ in London, a harmony rivalled in the Welsh church of St Augustine’s at Penarth near Cardiff built a decade later in 1866. At the same time, Teulon at St Andrew’s in Coin Street off Stamford Street south of the Thames in London was using the boldest of brick-and-stone banding externally and, inside, elaborate patterns of light-coloured brickwork. Moreover, the rather Germanic planning of this church, demolished since the Second World War, was highly unorthodox by ecclesiological standards. Already it was evident that within the High Victorian Gothic there were to be two streams, one High Church in its patronage and led by architects of considerable learning and sophistication like Butterfield and Street, another more characteristically Low Church and often quite secular; this was generally coarser and more philistine, not to say outright illiterate.

Yet not all the best work of the High Church architects was ecclesiastical. By 1857 J. L. Pearson (1817-97) had already built some respectable if not very interesting churches distinguished chiefly by their very fine spires; but his first work of positive High Victorian character was Quar Wood, a country house he built in Gloucestershire in that year. The skilful asymmetrical massing around the stair tower here, the plastic variety provided by several different types of steep roofs, the crisp precision of the detailing, all combine to produce a modest mansion that is as different in effect from Teulon’s mountainous Tortworth as both are characteristic of the beginnings of the High Victorian Gothic.

Two houses begun soon after Quar Wood, both within the broad frame of reference of the maturing High Victorian Gothic, could hardly differ more from one another. In remodelling Eatington Park in Warwickshire in 1858 John Prichard (1818-86) attempted to mask an underlying Georgian mansion with a profusion of bold innovations in the detailing. Stone polychromy, applied sculpture, bold plastic membering of wall, roof, and chimneys, all are used here more abundantly than ever before. The Red House at Bexley Heath in Kent, on the other hand, which Philip Webb (1831-1915), who had been a fellow pupil with Morris in Street’s office, built for Morris in 1859-60, is notable for its extreme simplicity. So also is the house now known as Benfleet Hall that he built in 1861 at Cobham in Surrey for Spencer Stanhope, another of the young artists who had collaborated on the murals of the Oxford Union. This has a rather better plan than the Red House.

These houses have no external polychromy, only plain red brick beautifully laid; there is no sculptured detail at all; and the few breaks in the loose massing of the walls and roof are closely related to the informal ease of the rather novel plans. Only the high roofs of red tile are similar to those of Pearson’s Quar Wood. But in the plain, very ‘real’, detailing and the segmental-headed white-painted window-sash of an early eighteenth-century sort, set under pointed relieving arches, the relationship is close to the secular work of somewhat older men—to Butterfield’s vicarages of the forties (Plate 122B) and more notably to his clergy house and school at All Saints’, Margaret Street (Plate 86A). Webb had himself worked on some of the latest of the rather similar vicarages and schools that Street had been building for a decade. His first big country house, Arisaig, built of local stone in the remote Scottish Highlands forty miles beyond Fort William in Inverness-shire beginning in 1863, may properly be considered High Victorian Gothic also (Figure 23). It is especially interesting, like Benfleet Hall, for its plan (see Chapter 15).

Down to about 1860 the development of the High Victorian Gothic was on the whole convergent. Henceforth, ambitious young architects tried harder to have personal modes of their own like Butterfield; yet, conversely, many formed loose stylistic alliances in which individual expression became merged in some sort of group expression. The boldest and the most unruly were no longer likely to be of the High Church party, but rather of the Low. St Simon Zelotes of 1859 in Moore Street in London by Joseph Peacock (1821-93) hardly compares with the work of Butterfield and Street in distinction; but its internal polychromy of white and black brick outbids that of their best London churches, also built at the end of this decade.

Butterfield’s St Alban’s in Baldwin’s Gardens off Holborn in London, erected 1858-61, is all rebuilt now. But something of its splendidly tall proportions, if not the rich brick and tile marquetry of the wall over the chancel arch, can still be apprehended. The contrast in quality with Peacock’s work was once amazing. Street’s St James the Less in Thorndike Street off the Vauxhall Bridge Road in London also of 1858-61, is less fine but still much superior to Peacock’s work (Plate 94B). The tall square tower, set apart like a campanile, has a curiously gawky roof based on French models and the interior is somewhat cavernous. But in the richness of its red and black brick patterns, used both inside and out, and in the naturalistic carving of the nave capitals this church of Street’s rivals Butterfield’s All Saints’ and St Alban’s and is, unlike the latter, still completely intact.

Various younger men of Webb’s generation were beginning to make important contributions in church design also. G. F. Bodley (1827-1907), trained in his kinsman Scott’s office rather than in Street’s, built St Michael’s, Brighton, in 1859-62. This must have been very striking for the boldness of its scale and for the vigour of its structural expression before it was overshadowed by the tall later nave beside it added by William Burges (1827-81).[224] But it is not the parody of ‘Early French’ detailing in the square archivolts and spreading capitals of the nave arcade, so soon to be abjured by Bodley, that is significant here but the fact that this was the first church to receive an over-all decorative treatment, including stained glass, at the hands of Morris and his associates, who included the painters Ford Madox Brown and Edward Burne-Jones.

There is still finer glass of this period designed by Burne-Jones in the east window of Waltham Abbey in Essex, where the rear wall was rebuilt in the heaviest ‘Early French’ taste by Burges in 1860-1. As a painter Burne-Jones is hardly to be compared with Ingres; yet as a designer of stained glass the superiority of such early windows of his as these at Waltham Abbey to the ones by Ingres at Dreux and at Neuilly is amazing. It is not the least claim to distinction of the High Victorian Gothic that it nurtured this brilliant revival of decorative art led by Morris. Many churches of the sixties and seventies are worth visiting solely for their windows by Morris, Brown, and Burne-Jones to which there are apparently no worthy Continental parallels.

A quite different sort of contemporary church is White’s Holy Saviour, Aberdeen Park, in London, of 1859. Externally this is quiet and rather shapeless; but inside the red brick of the exterior gives way to a subtle harmony of patterned brickwork in beiges, browns, and mauves—assisted in the chancel by some additional decorative painting—that is unequalled in High Victorian polychromy. Also rather different from standard High Church Anglican work of the day is the Catholic church of St Peter in Leamington of 1861-5 (Plate 89A) by Henry Clutton (1819-93). He had won the competition for Lille Cathedral in France in 1855 with a design prepared in collaboration with Burges, but was not allowed to supervise the construction because he was a Protestant; English Roman Catholics were not so bigoted. Internally the characteristic articulation of Puginian planning was given up; nave and apse form one continuous vessel, almost basilican in effect, under a barrel roof that ends in a half dome. Unfortunately, the painted decoration of the walls and the ceiling here has all been destroyed; the effect must once have been much less barren than it is today. Externally, plain red brick is most happily combined with stone trim treated with great simplicity and yet with extreme subtlety. The inspiration is Early French, perhaps influenced by Viollet-le-Duc,[225] although Clutton knew old French work at first hand; but the smooth concavities and the delicately varied chamfers are handled with the greatest originality and justness of scaling. The fine tower, at once sturdy in its detailing and svelte in its shape, has lost the original pyramidal roof.

Not unworthy of the church, and vastly superior to Clutton’s rather dull country houses, is the contiguous rectory here, a rectangle in plan with the long gable broken only by elegantly chamfered pairs of brick chimneys (Plate 89A). The expanses of plain brick wall are regularly but not symmetrically pierced by coupled windows divided by colonnette mullions of stone. In simplicity of massing this rectory surpassed the Red House and Webb’s other—and in some ways better—early house for Spencer Stanhope, Benfleet Hall. In their simple dignity such things contrast sharply with the more ambitious secular work of the day, by this time reaching peaks of elaboration almost exceeding Prichard’s Eatington Park.

Teulon’s Elvethan Park in Hampshire of 1861, for example, is perhaps the wildest of all High Victorian Gothic houses; this mansion is so complex in composition and so varied in its detailing that it quite defies description. Polychromy runs riot, forms of the most various but undefinable Gothic provenience merge into one another, and the result seems almost to illustrate that original mode of design which Thomas Harris (1830-1900)[226] had just christened ‘Victorian’ in describing a project he published in 1860 for a terrace of houses at Harrow.

However, several churches of the mid sixties rivalled Elvethan Hall, if not Harris’s ‘Victorian Terrace’. There was, for example, Teulon’s own St Thomas’s, Wrotham Road, of 1864, piling up to its heavy central tower among the railway yards of Camden Town in London; and there was also his much more peculiar St Paul’s, Avenue Road, also of 1864, in the approaches to Hampstead. This was purged early of its original internal decoration but it long remained externally an almost unrecognizable variant of the standard Victorian Gothic church. Both have been demolished since the war. At St Mary’s in the London suburb of Ealing, built in 1866-73, Teulon used iron columns for the nave arcade; a still wilder Low Church architect, Bassett Keeling (1836-86), did the same in two London churches, St Mark’s in St Mark’s Road, Notting Dale, and St George’s on Campden Hill (where they have since been replaced), both begun in 1864. Nor were Teulon and Keeling by any means the only architects to revive the use of iron columns in the sixties; even Burges introduced them once in a church, St Faith’s at Stoke Newington, now largely demolished, and also in his Speech Room at Harrow School of 1872.

Of a quite different order is another London church, St Martin’s in Vicars Road, Gospel Oak, also begun in 1864. This is by E. B. Lamb (1805-69), an architect who had already begun to show rather High Victorian tendencies in the thirties. There is no polychromy here, and the inspiration from the past is neither Italian nor French but the still heterodox English Perpendicular. The massive plasticity of Lamb’s personal mode, with much large-scale chamfering and a consistent use of segmental-pointed arches in several orders, is happier where it was exploited more simply on the nearby rectory. The interior of his church, which has a sort of central plan with wide transepts and only a slightly prolonged nave, is a forest of timber-work ingeniously bracketed and intersected in a fashion peculiar to Lamb. Only perhaps in an international context, in relation to the contemporary American ‘Stick Style’, is this sort of structural articulation intelligible (see Chapter 15). But the solid, compactly planned, and simply detailed rectory has virtues not unworthy of comparison with Clutton’s at Leamington, if not perhaps with Webb’s more delicately scaled and functionally articulated early houses.

Two churches by Street, St John’s at Torquay of 1861-71[227] and St Philip and St James’s at Oxford, which was completed in 1862, are more standard products of the early sixties. The former is notable for the very rich marble polychromy in the chancel and the full complement of windows by Morris and Burne-Jones; the latter is more ‘Early French’ with a tall tower rising in front of the polygonal apse and a curiously unorthodox but effectively ‘real’ way of running the nave arches into the east wall with no imposts at all. This device was repeated at All Saints’, Clifton, now a ruin, where the variety of colours of the fine local stones—orange and blue Pennant and cream Bath—permitted a more truly structural polychromy than usual and one of remarkable tonal harmony and elegance. All Saints’ was begun in 1863.

Both Burges and Pearson erected distinguished churches at this time, Burges in Ireland, Pearson in London. St Finbar’s Church of Ireland Cathedral in Cork, designed in 1863 for a competition and built in 1865-76, is of unusual size for a British church of this period and, what is more unusual for a nineteenth-century cathedral, it was completed without serious modification of the original project. Provided with a fine open site and a full complement of towers, two flanking the west front and a taller one over the crossing, this rivals in elaboration the big Continental Gothic churches of the period (see Chapter 11). Moreover, the detailing is of a distinctly French twelfth-century order with very few eclectic or Italianate touches, thus recalling the winning design for Lille Cathedral that he had prepared with Clutton in 1855. Yet the contrast with contemporary Continental Gothic—especially with Lille Cathedral as finally executed by others—is almost as great as in the case of the rather more original English churches of this period by Butterfield or Street.

In the interior of St Finbar’s Burges developed the theme of articulation, a theme more characteristically Early English than ‘Early French’, with remarkable plastic vigour, while the handsome wooden roof, so rare a feature in medieval France, lends to the whole an unmistakably Victorian air. Less subtle, less aesthetic, than other churches of the sixties by younger men, St Finbar’s has the sort of athletic strength that is characteristic of much High Victorian Gothic, expressed in unusually literate, not to say archaeological, terms.

Burges’s church opened the road again towards a more ‘correct’ imitation of the medieval High Gothic, a road along which Pearson soon proceeded more rapidly and more doggedly than he. Yet Pearson’s own South London church of 1863-5, St Peter’s in Kennington Lane, Vauxhall, is more typically High Victorian than St Finbar’s. The carved capitals and the heavy scale of the stone detail are rather ‘Early French’. But walls and vaults are of London stock brick and there is some polychromy of the quieter, less Butterfieldian, sort resembling a little White’s at St Saviour’s. The continuity of the chancel and rounded apse with the nave echoes the ‘unified space’ of Clutton’s Leamington interior. Puginian articulation of plan and mass was henceforth somewhat out of date.

The Albert Memorial[228] in Hyde Park in London is a monument generally—and not unjustly—considered the perfect symbol of this High Victorian period, more perfect than the Houses of Parliament (in the early sixties at last approaching completion) were of the previous Early Victorian period. In 1861 Queen Victoria’s beloved husband, the Prince Consort, died. In the competition for a national memorial to rise in Hyde Park near the site of the Crystal Palace, held the next year, G. G. Scott almost inevitably won first place. Construction of the Albert Memorial began in 1863 and took nearly ten years. By the time it was completed in 1872 critics of advanced taste were already condemning it, yet it represents precisely what Scott most liked to do and what he undoubtedly did best—in his own words, this his ‘most prominent work’ represented his ‘highest and most enthusiastic efforts’. It is, moreover, an epitome of the aspirations[229] that were most widely held when it was designed (Plate 90).

The contrast between this elaborate shrine and Scott’s modest and essentially archaeological Martyrs’ Memorial of 1841 at Oxford is very great—what a long distance the English Gothic Revival had travelled in a score of years! Among Early Victorian memorials the Prince Consort’s cenotaph is rather more like Kemp’s Scott Monument in Edinburgh (Plate 51) than like the Oxford one. But where Kemp’s is soft and monochrome, this is hard and almost kaleidoscopically polychromatic. Scott’s theme is still that of the fourteenth-century English Eleanor Crosses, as is certainly appropriate for a monument to a Royal spouse; but the inspiration came in the main from relatively small reliquaries and other medieval works executed in metal and embellished with enamels and semi-precious stones.

The Martyrs’ Memorial was purely English, the specific precedents for the Albert Memorial mostly Continental: Italian, French, German, and Flemish. The materials are cold and shining, polished granites, marbles, and serpentines of various colours; and much of the detail is executed in gun-metal left plain or gilded. A profusion of white marble sculpture at various scales leads up to the seated bronze figure of the Prince by J. H. Foley, finally installed in 1876, over which is a vaulted canopy of brilliantly coloured glass mosaic. Enamels, cabochons of marble or serpentine, and intricately crisp detail of the most metallic character carry out Scott’s basic idea of a ciborium enlarged, like Bernini’s in St Peter’s, to fully architectural scale.

Beside the Albert Memorial most of Scott’s other work of this period lacks interest. His churches, particularly, are likely to be dull and respectable, reflecting the new eclectic tastes of the day only in a rather inconspicuous way. His Exeter College Chapel at Oxford of 1856-8 is a sort of Sainte-Chapelle; St John’s College Chapel at Cambridge of 1863-9 is equally monumental but somewhat less French in character and also more original in its proportions. His secular work at Oxford and Cambridge is also dull, lacking the Ruskinian touches that give a certain vitality to the Meadow Buildings built for Christ Church in 1863 by Sir Thomas Deane and his son Thomas Newenham Deane (1828-99).

Far finer, however, is their Kildare Street Club in Dublin, facing the Trinity College Museum across an expanse of lawn; for this continues the best Ruskinian tradition of the work that they did earlier with Woodward.[230]

A very striking example of the Gothic of the early sixties in England, superior to anything at Oxford or Cambridge, is the Merchant Seamen’s Orphan Asylum of 1861 by G. Somers Clark (1825-82), now the Wanstead Hospital, in a suburb north-east of London. This is actually more what is supposed to be ‘Ruskinian’, because of its Venetian detailing, than the very original Dublin clubhouse with its consistent theme of segmental arches and its bold naturalistic carving; but, like that, the Wanstead building is generically High Victorian in the asymmetrical massing, the strong colours of the black-banded red brickwork, and the surprising richness of the decoration Clark lavished on a utilitarian structure.

In the early sixties several younger men, most of them trained in Street’s office, were already turning away from the stridency of the work of the High Victorian leaders towards a simpler and suaver mode. Webb’s houses of this period have been mentioned, and will be again (see Chapter 15). Here the plain row of small London shops that he built at 91-101 Worship Street, Finsbury, in 1861 might be described. In them the material is not even red brick, but London stocks excellently laid. Almost nothing is overtly Gothic, yet a sense of medieval craftsmanship controls the handling of both the wide shop-windows below and the sash-windows in the upper storeys. Above all, the general composition is quiet and regular, more like Clutton’s Leamington rectory than the asymmetrical articulation that is characteristic of Webb’s own houses of these years.

A similar quietness controls the design of the wing that W. Eden Nesfield (1835-88), son of Barry’s collaborator on Italian gardens, William A. Nesfield (1793-1881), and a pupil not of Street but of Burn and Salvin, was adding to the Earl of Craven’s seat, Combe Abbey in Warwickshire, beginning in 1863. This was Nesfield’s earliest work. Despite his own studies of French Gothic,[231] which he had published the previous year with a dedication to Lord Craven, and the tracings he is supposed to have made from the illustrations of Gothic detail in Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire, the arches at Combe Abbey are round, not pointed, and the major architectural theme is the English late medieval ‘window-wall’ of many lights divided by stone mullions and transoms.

In a completely new house, Cloverley Hall, that Nesfield began in 1865 together with his partner Richard Norman Shaw (1831-1912), the great window-bays and the other ranges of stone-mullioned windows in the beautifully laid salmon-pink brick walls were even more the principal theme of the design. But in the decorations, delicate in scale and elegant in craftsmanship, a new sort of eclecticism made its appearance. Basically the house derives from those manor houses of the sixteenth century that were uninfluenced by Renaissance ideas; but in the detailing of Cloverley there were Japanese motifs, notably the sunflower disks that Nesfield called his ‘pies’, reflecting the new interest in oriental art that such painters as Whistler and Rossetti were taking. Except for its relatively early date, Cloverley Hall has no place in a discussion of High Victorian Gothic, for it is characteristically Late Victorian (see Chapter 15).

Nesfield’s partner Shaw, however, built in the sixties two churches that were still High Victorian in style, one in Yorkshire, the other at Lyons in France. Holy Trinity at Bingley of 1866-7 is one of the finest examples of the ‘Early French’ phase of the Victorian Gothic (Plate 94A). Externally it builds up to a very tall central tower, superbly proportioned and very simply detailed, that more than rivals in quality Street’s at Oxford. Internally the fine random-ashlar stonework—there is no polychromy—the very bold and structural detailing of the square archivolts and the simply carved capitals illustrate even better than does Webb’s domestic work in brick the new and more sophisticated attitude towards the building crafts. The principles involved go back to Pugin; but now for the first time in Webb’s and Nesfield’s and Shaw’s work of the sixties one senses a real respect, at once intelligent and intuitive, for the differing nature of different materials. Such a respect would continue to give special virtue to the work of the most distinguished English and American architects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Chapters 12, 13, 15, and 19).

The Lyons church, which Shaw began in 1868, is perhaps the finest of the many Victorian churches built on the Continent for local English colonies, but very different indeed from that at Bingley. A city church set between tall blocks of flats, this is also very tall in its proportions and has a more urban character than that of the Yorkshire church. French freestone does not lend itself to the particular type of semi-rustic craftsmanship that was now rising to favour with the younger English architects; hence the Lyons church is less significant than the Bingley one in that respect. But Shaw was not primarily a church architect, nor did he long remain a High Victorian (see Chapter 12).

More characteristic of the various new directions that the Victorian Gothic was taking in the mid sixties, directions that soon also led quite away from the High Victorian, are two new churches both designed well before Shaw’s at Bingley and Lyons were begun. At All Saints’ in Jesus Lane, Cambridge, begun in 1863, the spikiness of the Italianizing Victorian Gothic and the rugged structuralism of the ‘Early French’—rarely carried farther than in Bodley’s own early work—gave way to something much more English in inspiration. There is, for example, a very deep chancel and only one aisle, not to speak of a battlemented tower at one side, out of which rises a small stone spire. In fact, Bodley returned here to the fourteenth-century Decorated models preferred by Pugin, some so ‘late’ as to suggest the still forbidden Perpendicular.

Bodley now made even more use of the decorative talents of Morris and his associates than at St Michael’s, Brighton. His St Martin’s-on-the-Cliff, Scarborough, completed in 1863, is a finer church than either St Michael’s or All Saints’. Falling between them in style as well as in date, this has less historical importance, but it also was richly decorated by the Morris firm. At All Saints’ painted polychromy, but of a rather subtle order much superior to most of that of the forties, entirely replaced permanent polychrome. The brocade patterns stencilled on the walls seem almost to be designs of Pugin strengthened in their outlines and their colours by Morris. Although Bodley’s mature career as one of the two principal Late Victorian church architects did not really get under way until 1870, Victorian Gothic was evidently coming full circle at All Saints’, and the High Victorian phase was nearly over.

The other important new church of this period, St Saviour’s, Penn Street, in the Hoxton district of the East End of London, was begun in 1865 by James Brooks (1825-1901). Unfortunately this was very badly damaged in the blitz, and has since been demolished. St Saviour’s was of brick and included some polychromy like Brooks’s slightly earlier East End church, St Michael’s in Mark Street, Shoreditch, of 1863-5. But what was really significant at St Saviour’s was the unified interior space, ending like Clutton’s Leamington church and Pearson’s Vauxhall church in London in a rounded apse (Plate 89B). Notable also were the Webb-like quietness of the general composition and the straightforward handling of the main structural elements. In another, happily unblitzed, church by Brooks in the East End of London, St Chad’s, Nichols Square, in Haggerston, which was begun in 1867, the same qualities can be seen in a more mature state. Moreover, the rather plain windows and the simple moulded brick trim are echoed at domestic scale on the nearby rectory.

The fine vessel of the interior of St Chad’s, with its simple nave arcade of stone, clean red-brick walls, quietly structural wooden roof over the nave, and brick-vaulted chancel, contrasts strikingly with the hectic elaboration and dramatically vertical proportions of Butterfield’s last London church of any great interest, St Augustine’s, Queen’s Gate, of 1865-71. Two churches of the late sixties outside London, All Saints’ at Babbacombe near Torquay, which was built in 1868-74, and the earlier mentioned St Augustine’s at Penarth, begun in 1866, are much more satisfactory examples of Butterfield’s middle period.

Brooks continued through the seventies to develop the implications of his East End churches with great success. The largest and most notable is that of the Ascension, Lavender Hill, in Battersea, which was begun in 1873 and completed by J. T. Micklethwaite[232] (1843-1906), a former assistant of G. G. Scott, in 1883. The vast lancet-pierced red-brick hull of this church is one of the landmarks of the South London skyline; the interior, which is perhaps a little bare, has nevertheless a monumentality of scale rare in English churches of any period. However, this monumentality is rivalled both inside and out in St Bartholomew’s, Brighton (Plate 93B), completed in 1875 by Edmund E. Scott (?-1895), and considerably later in Brooks’s own London church of All Hallows, Shirlock Street, begun in 1889 and never provided with its intended vaults.

Victorian Gothic, whether Early or High, is primarily an ecclesiastical mode. The leading Neo-Gothic architects were happiest when building churches; their few secular works—if parsonages, colleges, and schools can really in this period be called secular—generally have a churchy tone. But it is characteristic of the High Victorian Gothic as opposed to the Early Victorian Gothic, and a fortiori to Neo-Gothic on the Continent, that it became for some twenty years, from the early fifties to the early seventies, a nearly universal mode.[233] A good many houses have already been cited; and certainly no churches of this period provide finer specimens of High Victorian Gothic than the warehouse at 104 Stokes Croft in Bristol, which was built by E. W. Godwin (1833-86), a friend of Burges, in the early sixties (Plate 113), or the office building of 1864-5 at 60 Mark Lane in London by George Aitchison (1825-1910). The one is an especially subtly polychromed attempt to follow Ruskin’s Italianism, the other more ‘Early French’ in its detail, but both use round-arched arcading throughout their several storeys (see Chapter 14).

Godwin in two rather modest town halls, one at Northampton of 1861-4, which is very rich in sculptural detail, the other at Congleton, Cheshire, of 1864-7, which is more severe and ‘Early French’ in character, produced two further High Victorian Gothic[234] works of the highest quality (Plate 92A). Unfortunately by the time the taste of the authorities in the larger English cities caught up in the late sixties with the advanced position of the High Church architectural leaders, those leaders had left that position far behind. As a result, many of the biggest and most conspicuous public edifices are very retardataire. Gothic designs won only low premiums in the Government Offices competition in 1857, although both Street’s and Deane & Woodward’s—on which Ruskin advised—were of considerable distinction. When Alfred Waterhouse (1830-1905) two years later won the competition for the Manchester Assize Courts he elaborated the design of this large public structure along the rather unimaginative lines of Deane & Woodward’s earlier Oxford Museum, then just reaching completion.

At best Waterhouse had a rather heavy hand and an uncertain sort of eclectic taste somewhat like G. G. Scott’s. He lacked the cranky boldness of a Butterfield, the sophistication of a Street, and the sense of craftsmanship of such men as Webb and Godwin who were his own contemporaries. But he did have real capacity as a planner of large and complex buildings, something at which most of the leading church architects had little or no experience. Thus his Manchester Town Hall, begun ten years later than the Assize Courts in 1869, while lacking all the refinement of Godwin’s smaller and earlier ones, is a large-scale exercise in High Victorian Gothic of some interest. But inevitably the High Victorian Gothic was a mode less well suited to this kind of monumental exploitation than the contemporary Second Empire mode as naturalized in England and America. For all the skill of Waterhouse in the organization of plan and general composition and in the bold detailing of materials inside and out, the Manchester Town Hall is a late and inferior work—late, that is, in the phase of style which it represents, though not so late in the highly successful career of its architect. It may properly be compared, and to its own manifest advantage, moreover, with Schmidt’s Rathaus in Vienna.

The other most conspicuous High Victorian Gothic public monument, the Law Courts in London, is the work of Street, an older and far more distinguished architect; but it came very late indeed in Street’s career, so late that he died before it was finished in 1882. Designed originally for a competition held in 1866, many years dragged by during which the site was twice changed—once southward to the river’s edge and then back to the north of the Strand—before it was even begun in 1874. Other work of the late sixties and early seventies by Street indicates how completely his own taste had turned away from this sort of French thirteenth-century Gothic even before the Law Courts were started.

At St Margaret’s in Liverpool, for example, which he designed in 1867, Street reverted to English fourteenth-century models; thus, like Bodley at All Saints’, Cambridge, he seemed to be returning to the particular stylistic ideal with which the ecclesiologists had started out twenty-five years before. In the Guards’ Chapel at the Wellington Barracks in London, however, which was all but completely destroyed in the blitz, he in 1877 remodelled the interior of an engineer-built Grecian edifice with incredible sumptuousness in a sort of Byzantinoid Italian Romanesque, using a stone-and-brick banded barrel vault and a glittering investiture of gold and glass mosaic that quite outshone the comparable work of Continental architects in the Rundbogenstil. Then, in remodelling the interior of St Luke’s, West Norwood, near London, built by Francis Bedford (1784-1858) in 1823-5, equally Grecian, he used in 1878-9 round-arched Italian detail. Despite the bold banding in brick and stone, this is certainly not Gothic or Byzantine, but rather recalls the Tuscan Proto-Renaissance, or even the quattrocento.

Certain buildings by Deane & Woodward and by Scott at Oxford and Cambridge have already been mentioned; much more exists by Scott, Waterhouse, and various others, very little of it of any distinction, yet sometimes fitting not too uncomfortably into the general scene. The most striking example of Victorian Gothic architecture at Oxford, fortunately on an isolated site opposite the Parks, where it had no neighbours earlier than the Museum, is Butterfield’s Keble College, a complete entity in itself, largely built in 1868-70. With its walls so violently striated with bricks of various colours, Keble would have been a most disturbing increment to any existing college; on the other hand, Butterfield’s quietly stone-banded chapel at Balliol of 1857 is that college’s happiest feature, the rest being largely the work of Waterhouse.

Since Keble was founded by Butterfield’s pious High Church friends for clerical students, the chapel, which was added to the group in 1873-6, understandably dominates the whole. Tall and richly decorated, this has many of Butterfield’s virtues, but it quite lacks the directness and the poignance of his best work of the fifties and early sixties. The hall and library are less monumental than the chapel, fitting more easily into the ranges of sets that surround the two quadrangles. The over-all composition is fairly regular, and there is less coarse or fussy detailing than Scott and Waterhouse used for their ‘Collegiate Gothic’. Moreover, the scale of Keble is modestly domestic and, despite its considerable size, the features are simple and crisp; but in the relatively clean air of Oxford Butterfield’s polychromy has received less of the desirable mellowing than it gets in London. The banded walls certainly lack the harmony that the softer colours of the materials used in his country church interiors generally produced.

By the time Keble was completed—indeed in advanced circles well before it was begun—such polychromatic brashness was out of date. Yet at Rugby School, where Butterfield’s buildings of 1868-72 awkwardly adjoin various earlier nineteenth-century Gothic structures, the polychromy is even louder; moreover, it is still less mellowed by time. Although Butterfield lived on through the rest of the century and continued to build many churches and some schools, this first and boldest of High Victorian Gothic architects was more and more left behind after the mid sixties by the evolving taste of his own High Church milieu.

There are other High Victorian Gothic collegiate groups which are, or would have been if carried to completion, far finer than Keble. Being at less renowned institutions than Oxford, they are less well known. University College on the sea-front at Aberystwyth in Wales is by J. P. Seddon (1827-1906), from 1852 to 1862 a partner of John Prichard. This structure was begun in 1864 to serve as a hotel, incorporating as its most inappropriate nucleus a small Castellated villa built by Nash for Uvedale Price in the 1780s. The failure of the hotel project, the slow and faltering start of the college, and the necessary repair and rebuilding after two fires have left a complex pile of most disparate character, even though it is almost all by Seddon. But certain aspects of the building, the bowed section on the sea-front—originally the hotel bar, later the college chapel!—and the entrance and stair tower on the rear are among the grandest and most boldly plastic fragments produced in this period (Plate 91A). Neither Oxford nor Cambridge has anything of comparable quality.

For Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., Burges prepared in 1873 a splendid plan worthy of its fine new site on a high ridge south of the city (Plate 88). Unfortunately only one side of one quadrangle was finished according to his designs; but that is perhaps the most satisfactory of all his works, and the best example anywhere of Victorian Gothic collegiate architecture. The brownstone from nearby Portland, Conn., favourite material all over the eastern states during what Lewis Mumford has called the ‘Brown Decades’, is especially well suited to Burges’s heavy and well-articulated detail. The rough quarry-facing of the random ashlar contrasts tonally with the more smoothly cut trim in a fashion that is polytonal if not polychromatic. The roughness of the stone walls also enhances the massive proportions of the long dormitory range and of the paired towers with their boldly pyramidal roofs. Yet for the classrooms this masonry is articulated into banks of large mullioned windows. Despite the general regularity and even symmetry of the composition, there is plenty of functionally logical variety in the handling of the different sections. Burges was happy in the Scottish-born Hartford architect who supervised the work, G. W. Keller (1842-1935); and Keller revealed his continued debt to Burges in the construction of a Memorial Arch in the park in Hartford which is one of the very few examples of such a Classical monument completely translated into Gothic terms, and not without real interest.

Burges undoubtedly enjoyed more what he did for the Marquess of Bute, beginning in 1865, in restoring Cardiff Castle and Castell Coch in Wales. ‘Restoring’ should be put in quotation marks, for by the time Burges got through with them both were almost as much fake castles as any built in the first half of the century. They lie somewhere between Fonthill Abbey and Peckforton in intention and are considerably more sumptuous internally than either. Although Cardiff Castle, which had been subjected to drastic Georgian remodelling, was gradually re-castellated with considerable consistency, the work there never reached completion. It is chiefly the incredibly rich interiors that are of interest, even if the interest is of a rather theatrical order.

Castell Coch near Llandaff, restored in 1875, interiors of equal fantasy, almost comparable to those of Neuschwanstein; that is, they are more like settings for Wagnerian opera than anything the Middle Ages actually created. But the quality of the imagination and of the execution is of a very much higher order than Ludwig II commanded. Externally Castell Coch is a sober and plausible restoration-reconstruction of a smallish castle, chiefly of archaeological interest, but most romantically sited and solidly built. Beside its integrity the more famous restorations by Viollet-le-Duc at Pierrefonds and Carcassonne appear rather harsh, and obviously modern.

The McConochie house, built in Cardiff for Lord Bute’s estate agent, is one of the best medium-sized stone dwellings of the High Victorian Gothic, superior in almost every way to Burges’s own house at 9 Melbury Road in London. That was built later, in 1875-80, by which time the operatic medievalism of the interiors was quite out of date (see Chapter 12). Here in the Cardiff house the tight asymmetrical composition, the excellent detailing of the handsome stonework, and a generally domestic rather than Castellated air prepared the way for Burges’s fine collegiate work in America.

English architects in the sixties were capable of exploiting a wide range of different aspects of the High Victorian Gothic in almost precisely the same years. Only the size and departmentalized organization of G. G. Scott’s office, the largest of the period and more like the ‘plan-factories’ of the twentieth century (see Chapter 24), can explain how he could be nominally responsible for such a quiet, well-scaled, and advanced church as St Andrew’s, Derby, designed in 1866—some say by Micklethwaite, who was working for him at the time—and also for such a strident, complex, and over-elaborated edifice as the Midland Hotel fronting St Pancras Station. The design for this was prepared in 1865 for a competition held, curiously enough, two years after the shed had been begun by the engineers W. H. Barlow (1812-1902) and R. M. Ordish (1824-86). Such a drastic divorce of engineering and architecture could hardly be expected to produce a co-ordinated edifice, yet both aspects of St Pancras have considerable independent interest. The shed, ingeniously tied below the level of the tracks and rising, for purely coincidental technical reasons, to a flattened point of slightly ‘Gothic’ outline, has the widest span of any in the British Isles and, until the nineties, in the world. It is, therefore, a nineteenth-century spatial achievement of quantitative, if not so much of qualitative, significance. The masonry block at the front is one of the largest High Victorian Gothic structures in the world. It long had ardent admirers, and it has come to have them again, for it epitomizes almost as notably as the Albert Memorial the aspirations of Scott and his generation. The contrast to its neighbour, Lewis Cubitt’s Kings Cross Station, begun some fifteen years earlier, or even to Paddington, where the engineer Brunel and the architect Wyatt collaborated so happily, is striking. The taste of English railway authorities, as of most patrons of architecture, had been revolutionized by the general triumph of the High Victorian Gothic in the late fifties and early sixties. Yet on its completion in the mid seventies St Pancras was even more out of fashion in advanced circles than were Street’s Law Courts, the construction of which only began at that time, so rapidly did taste continue to change in the late sixties and early seventies.

By 1870 church architecture, for example, was in general much chastened. Externally Teulon’s St Stephen’s, The Green, on Rosslyn Hill in Hampstead of 1869-76 is not polychromatic but all of purple-brown brick with some creamy stone trim. It builds up, moreover, somewhat like Shaw’s Bingley church begun a few years earlier, to a tall rectangular crossing tower with rather quiet, more or less ‘Early French’, membering. Inside Teulon achieved in the brickwork a kind of golden harmony of tone resembling that of White’s interior in St Saviour’s, Aberdeen Park, completely eschewing the bold and almost savage patterns of contrastingly coloured bricks he had favoured since the early fifties. In the tremendously tall interior of Edmund Scott’s already mentioned St Bartholomew’s, Brighton—aisleless, chancel-less, and provided with broad, flat internal buttresses—the traces of brick polychromy are hardly noticeable on the walls of a space so grandly proportioned (Plate 93B). The later ciborium here is not by Scott.

Burges in the two Yorkshire churches which he began in 1871 at Skelton and at Studley Royal, both near Ripon, the latter with a very fine rectory near by, still aimed at a rather satiating luxury of both coloured and sculptural decoration in the interiors. But Pearson at St Augustine’s, Kilburn Park Road, in London, initiated at this time a new line of vast plain churches (Plate 93A). That line would culminate in the archaeological correctness of his Truro Cathedral in Cornwall, started in 1880 and finally completed by his son (F. L., 1864-1947) in the present century. His last work, the cathedral of Brisbane, Australia, designed shortly before his death in 1897, was only begun by his son in 1901.

As Pearson’s Kilburn church was built in 1870-80, it should perhaps more properly be considered Late Victorian than High. But Pearson retained here and to the end of his life, particularly in his tall towers and spires, a truly High Victorian love of grand and bold effects. However archaeological he became, and with his passion for rib-vaulting he could from this time on be rather more archaeological in a Franco-English way than Viollet-le-Duc in France or Cuijpers in Holland, his spaces are usually nobly proportioned and his masses crisply composed no matter how ‘correctly’ they are membered. At Truro, where the cathedral rises suddenly out of narrow streets, its granite still almost unweathered, Pearson’s handling of the relationship of the three tall towers carries vigorous plastic conviction; Burges had attempted the same effect at Cork with rather less success when the High Victorian was still at its highest. Brisbane Cathedral is plainer and tougher than Truro despite its very late date.

It would be inappropriate in this chapter to carry the story of Victorian Gothic much further. Scott and Street died in 1878 and 1881 respectively, though Butterfield and Bodley outlived Pearson. Butterfield seems to have frozen for life in the mode of his early maturity, and as a result produced ever feebler work after the mid sixties; Pearson was able to maintain a leading position with a younger generation grown chaster and more archaeological in its standards without forsaking his pursuit of those more abstractly architectonic values which give distinction to his earlier work. It was above all Bodley, however, with his Late Decorated verging on Perpendicular, who set the pace in Anglican church-architecture from this time forward. His personal style, still tentative at All Saints, Cambridge, in the mid sixties, was mature by the time he built St Augustine’s at Pendlebury in Lancashire in 1870-4. Crisp and almost mechanical in its detailing, this tall rectangular mass, buttressed by an internal arcade, is impressive both inside and out (Plate 92B), yet it wholly abjures most of the qualities that had for two decades given special vitality to English Neo-Gothic.

With various modulations what might, rather ambiguously, be called ‘Bodleian Gothic’ remained the favourite of Anglicans in and out of England well into the twentieth century. The continuing admiration for the work of Sir Ninian Comper (1864-1960) in certain milieus suggests that it has not even yet been finally superseded; but much of Comper’s large-scale work dates from before Bodley’s death in 1907. For example, his principal London church, St Cyprian’s in Glentworth Street, was built in 1903. This crisp and clean example of revived Late Gothic, with its elegant gilt font-cover and screen, may wind up this account more appropriately than the vast unfinished cathedral at Liverpool begun by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (1880-1960), a grandson of the first G. G. Scott, in 1903. But neither is Victorian Gothic; both are rather manifestations of one aspect of twentieth-century ‘traditionalism’ (see Chapter 24).

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11. LATER NEO-GOTHIC OUTSIDE ENGLAND

THE High Victorian Gothic produced in the United States no such roster of distinguished—or at least prominent and highly characteristic—monuments as in Britain. The period of its florescence was much briefer, and few assured and sophisticated talents came to the fore. If, in the case of Richardson, one such did appear, his maturity came only in the mid seventies, when the High Victorian Gothic was all but over. Why the period was so much shorter in the United States, in effect only the decade 1865-75, is not altogether clear. One reason, undoubtedly, is that the speed of transmission of new architectural ideas from England to America had increased so much by the seventies that the influence of the later English mode which succeeded the High Victorian Gothic around 1870 reached America very promptly indeed (see Chapters 13 and 15). Another quite different reason is that a wave of nationalism in America, parallel to those current in North European countries at the time, encouraged from the mid seventies developments that were more autochthonous. Leadership in commercial and in domestic architecture crossed the Atlantic almost precisely at the moment when, in 1876, the centenary[235] of American political independence was being celebrated.

The phenomenal success in the United States of Ruskin’s treatises, The Seven Lamps of Architecture of 1849 and The Stones of Venice[236] of 1851-3, should be emphasized; from 1855 Street’s Brick and Marble Architecture was also available. Yet, despite the warm reception of such relevant writings, few reflections of the High Victorian Gothic can be discerned in American production before 1860. The first is probably the Nott Memorial Library[237] at Union College, Schenectady, N.Y., designed by Edward T. Potter (1831-1904) in 1856 and built in 1858-76. Here the banded arches are pointed and the plan is circular, perhaps in emulation of the Pisa Baptistery to which Ruskin had called attention, but more probably in deference to Ramée’s general plan for the college (see Chapter 1).

The years immediately following the Panic of 1857 and, quite understandably, the Civil War years 1861-5 were relatively unproductive of new buildings, as has already been noted. An edifice far more overtly Ruskinian than Potter’s Library was the National Academy in New York, built by Peter B. Wight (1838-1925) in 1863-5, although apparently first designed as early as 1861. Its Venetian Gothic mode, with pointed arches boldly banded and walls diapered in coloured stones, was still the subject of considerable contemporary controversy as it would hardly have been in England by this date.

Potter and Wight were both young men. Established Gothic Revivalists in America did not swing over as rapidly as in England from the Early Victorian to the High. Upjohn, Potter’s master, was no Butterfield; Renwick when designing St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York in 1859 followed contemporary Continental rather than English models, as has been noted, presumably because his clients were Catholics.

At best the sort of High Church Anglican patronage which sponsored Butterfield’s and Street’s innovations in England was relatively much less important in the United States—or Canada and Australia, for that matter. Enthusiasm for the High Victorian Gothic, although widespread in the later sixties and early seventies, was rarely exclusive as is evidenced by the disparate interests and activities of the members of the prominent and successful firm of Ware & Van Brunt. It has already been noted that when William Robert Ware founded in 1865 the first American architectural school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, he based its instruction on that of the Paris École des Beaux-Arts.[238] His partner Henry Van Brunt (1832-1903) was one of the first to follow Richardson’s lead away from the High Victorian Gothic in the seventies. So little were either of them dyed-in-the-wool Gothicists in these decades.[239]

However, Ware & Van Brunt designed and built in Cambridge, Mass., one of the largest and most conspicuous of mature High Victorian Gothic edifices in America, Memorial Hall[240] at Harvard College, first projected in the late sixties and erected in 1870-8. This somewhat cathedral-like edifice has walls of red brick liberally lashed with black and a massive central tower now denuded by fire of its high roof (Plate 95A). The manner is more than a little Butterfieldian, but the quality is not even up to G. G. Scott.

Before Memorial Hall was designed, a competition held in 1865 for the First Church (Unitarian) in Boston in the new Back Bay residential district had brought out a variety of rather feeble attempts by Boston architects to follow the High Victorian Gothic line. The winning design of Ware & Van Brunt, executed in 1865-7, while not of the wilder Low Church order of Teulon’s or Keeling’s London work of these years, is hardly comparable to Street’s or Butterfield’s, much less to the contemporary production of younger architects such as Brooks, Bodley, or Shaw. Its best feature is the material, the richly mottled and textured local Puddingstone from nearby Roxbury.

The High Victorian Gothic of the sixties and early seventies in the United States was no more restricted to the ecclesiastical field than in England. Despite its churchy look, Memorial Hall served a variety of secular purposes from refectory to concert hall; only the wide transeptal lobby was strictly memorial in purpose. But there was rarely even such relative devotion to the Gothic in this period in the United States as the major works of Ware & Van Brunt display. For example, the untutored Elbridge Boyden (1810-98), best known for introducing the cast-iron commercial front into New England in 1854, could build two buildings for the Polytechnic Institute of Worcester, Mass., in the same year 1866 of which one, the Washburn Machine Shop, is mansarded with crude, vaguely Second Empire, detailing; while the other, Boynton Hall, is in a very provincial sort of High Victorian Gothic. Hunt, product of a Parisian education, designed the Yale Divinity School in New Haven in 1869 in a frenzied, rather Teulonian, Gothic; while in his precisely contemporary Lenox Library in New York, built in 1869-77, he followed closely and with some dignity French, if not specifically Second Empire, models.

It is not really surprising, therefore, that Richardson, returning from Paris and the École des Beaux-Arts at the end of the Civil War and entering a competition for a new Unitarian church to be built at Springfield, Mass., offered a High Victorian Gothic project that seems to derive rather directly from the work of Keeling and other Low Church English practitioners. What is surprising, however, considering the lack of special interest to later eyes in his Unity Church as executed in 1866-8, is the fact that he won the competition! The warm colour and texture of the rock-faced brownstone from nearby Longmeadow laid up in random ashlar, a certain masculine scale in the details, and an attempt at least at a boldly asymmetrical composition evidently struck his contemporaries as very promising, however. (The church was demolished in 1961.)

It was not in the Unity Church, but in Richardson’s second church, Grace Episcopal, in Medford, Mass., happily still extant, of 1867-8, that one recognizes strong personal expression. The more massively pyramidal character of the asymmetrical composition and, above all, the great boulders of which the walls are built, with heavy trim of rough quarry-faced granite, announce an original approach (Plate 91B). Yet this approach was evidently still nurtured on the English High Victorian Gothic models that Richardson knew through the wood engravings in imported periodicals. It is even specific enough here so that one can describe this Medford church as Burgessy rather than Butterfieldian or Street-like; it is certainly no longer Keelingesque like the church in Springfield. Incidentally, when Richardson visited England in 1882 it was the work of Burges, who had just died, that he went out of his way to see—by that time, however, he found it rather disappointing.

If Richardson’s first churches were Gothic, his Western Railway Office at Springfield, built in 1867 for a client associated with the Unity Church commission, was generically Second Empire. Yet this was still more directly derived from current English work that was closely related to that mode, notably the Francis Brothers’ National Discount Building of 1857 in the City of London, than from anything Parisian. His brick and stone Dorsheimer[241] house of 1868 in Delaware Avenue in Buffalo, N.Y., is also Second Empire rather than Victorian Gothic, but very restrainedly so, and hence rather more French in effect. Other work by Richardson dating from the late sixties, such as the B. H. Crowninshield house in Marlborough Street in Boston of 1868-9, was more experimental in design, often recalling wild English work of the early years of the decade. Although built of wood and of very modest size, Richardson’s most interesting house of this period was the one that he built for himself in 1868 at Arrochar on Staten Island near New York.[242] This combines the use of a high mansarded pavilion with a sort of imitation half-timbering related to the contemporary American ‘Stick Style’ (see Chapter 14).

In Farnam Hall at Yale College in New Haven (Plate 96A), begun in 1869, the German-trained Russell Sturgis (1836-1909),[243] who had been for a time Wight’s partner, somehow arrived at an almost Webb-like—or at least Brooks-like—simplicity and sophistication of late High Victorian Gothic design, in marked contrast to the stridency of Hunt’s precisely contemporary Divinity School there. This, however, is almost unique. The most characteristic work of the day was produced by such home-trained architects as Ware & Van Brunt, Wight, Edward T. Potter, and his younger brother William A. Potter (1842-1909).[244] Wight’s National Academy in New York has been mentioned. His Mercantile Library in Brooklyn, N.Y., completed in 1869, of red brick with ranges of pointed-arched windows regularly but asymmetrically disposed, is similar—and not inferior—to much of G. G. Scott’s secular work. Edward T. Potter’s Union College Library has also been mentioned. His Harvard Church in Brookline, Mass., of 1873-5 is more conventional for its period. Largely renewed internally after being gutted by a fire in 1931, this shows how effectively such American materials as the popular brownstone from Portland, Conn., and the light-coloured Berea sandstone from Ohio, enlivened by accents of livid green serpentine from Pennsylvania, could produce a polychromy richer and more enduring than the endemic Butterfieldian or Teulonian red brick, with banding of bricks dipped in black tar, that had been in general use for a decade. Along this line Richardson himself followed for a while (see Chapter 13). At the same time William A. Potter, who became very briefly Supervising Architect in Washington in succession to Mullet in 1875, produced a few post offices, such as the one in Pittsfield, Mass., that are characteristic but not very distinguished examples of secular High Victorian Gothic executed in stone. (Both Potters, however, gave up the High Victorian Gothic to accept Richardson’s leadership within the next few years.)

The Boston & Albany Railroad station in Worcester built by Ware & Van Brunt in 1875-7, with its tall and striking tower and its vast segmental-pointed arches at the ends of the shed, provides one of the happiest illustrations of what the rather illiterate approach of even the most highly trained Eastern architects of this period could produce. By working in an almost primitive way, along lines suggested by the half-understood work of the bolder English innovators, something was often achieved of which few Continental architects were capable in this period. In less sophisticated hands, whether of provincial architects or of builders, the results were naturally still cruder, though sometimes equally vital and fresh. In church design,[245] where ecclesiological control of planning was not accepted outside the Episcopal denomination, galleried auditorium schemes with rows of exposed iron columns were often executed with a violence of polychromy and a gawkiness of notched detailing that exceeded Teulon or Keeling at their most extreme. One of the most prominent extant examples is the squarish New Old South Church at Copley Square in the Back Bay district of Boston, built in 1874-5 by Charles A. Cummings (1833-1905) and his partner Sears in 1875-7. Its impressive tower resembling an Italian campanile has now been much reduced in height and chastened in silhouette.

Even more extreme than most churches, but of the highest quality, is the intensely personal work of Frank Furness (1839-1912)[246] in Philadelphia. His building for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Broad Street was erected in 1872-6 in preparation for the Centennial Exhibition. The exterior has a largeness of scale and a vigour in the detailing that would be notable anywhere, and the galleries are top-lit with exceptional efficiency. Still more original and impressive were his banks, even though they lay quite off the main line of development of commercial architecture in this period (see Chapter 14). The most extraordinary of these, and Furness’s masterpiece, was the Provident Institution in Walnut Street, built as late as 1879 (Plate 95B). This was most unfortunately demolished in the Philadelphia urban renewal campaign several years ago, but the gigantic and forceful scale of the granite membering alone should have justified its respectful preservation. The interior,[247] entirely lined with patterned tiles, was of rather later character than the façade and eventually much cluttered with later intrusions, but it was equally fine in its own way originally. Later work by Furness is of less interest, and his big Broad Street Station of 1892-4 has also been demolished. No small part of Furness’s historical significance lies in the fact that the young Louis Sullivan picked this office—then known as Furness & Hewitt—to work in for a short period after he left Ware’s school in Boston. As Sullivan’s Autobiography of an Idea testifies, the vitality and originality of Furness meant more to him than what he was taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or later at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris (see Chapter 14).

In the realm of house-design the more-or-less Gothic-based ‘Stick Style’ represented a largely autochthonous American development not without considerable significance and interest (see Chapter 15). In public architecture there was little serious achievement even at the hands of English-trained architects such as Calvert Vaux (1824-95) and his partner F. C. Withers (1828-1901)[248] or second-generation Gothicists like Upjohn’s son (Richard M., 1828-1903). The younger Upjohn’s Connecticut State Capitol[249] in Hartford begun in 1873, the only major American example of a High Victorian Gothic public monument of any great pretension or luxury of materials, is singularly vulgar and stylistically ambiguous, with its completely symmetrical massing and its tall central dome, compared to Burges’s contemporary project for Trinity College there.[250] Doubtless G. G. Scott would not have disdained it, even so!

Still more comparable to Scott’s own thwarted ambitions for a High Victorian Gothic governmental architecture, which led him as late as the seventies to enter various Continental competitions, is an earlier group of buildings in the New World outside the United States, the Parliament House (Plate 97A) and associated structures at Ottawa, Canada, designed by Fuller & Jones and Stent & Laver in 1859 and built in 1861-7. F. W. Stent had come out from England some considerable time before this, having last exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1846. Thomas Fuller (1822-98), also English, had settled in Toronto in 1856. Of their respective partners, Augustus Laver (1839-98) and Herbert Chilion Jones (1836-1923), less is known. In the course of the work Fuller and Laver joined forces, moving on shortly to the United States, as has been noted.

The main block at Ottawa, which was by the first-named firm, has been rebuilt after a fire in the present century in a considerably chastened vein, except for the big chapterhouse-like library at the rear, which is original. But the variety of form, the gusto of the detail, and the urbanistic scale of this project made of the Dominion Capitol a major monumental group unrivalled for extent and complexity of organization in England.[251] The buildings flanking the vast lawn extending in front of the Parliament House are by Stent & Laver. These are somewhat less exuberant in scale and more provincial in the character of their detailing than the Parliament House was originally.

Most of the Neo-Gothic in Canada up to this time is more properly to be considered Early rather than High Victorian (see Chapter 6). An exception to this, perhaps, is University College in Toronto, designed in 1856 by F. W. Cumberland (1821-81), who had come out from England in 1847. Yet its rich and rather bombastic Norman design is closer to English work of the earlier decades of the century than to the round-arched Ruskinian Gothic of the fifties.

Australia, the other major British Dominion, had nothing comparable to Canada to offer in this period. Wardell’s English, Scottish, and Australian Bank in Melbourne is a passable example of secular High Victorian Gothic but no more than that. St John Evangelist’s, which he built at Toorak south of Melbourne in 1860-73, is handsomer but very simple—still almost Puginian, indeed—and all of monochrome ashlar. The enormous Catholic cathedral of Melbourne, St Patrick’s, which Wardell began in 1860, is more Continental in character, with two west towers like Renwick’s St Patrick’s in New York and also a tall crossing tower completed only in 1939. The Catholic cathedral of Adelaide, St Francis Xavier’s, begun in 1870 and still without its intended western spires, reputedly goes back to a design prepared by Pugin before his death in 1852. But even the later design of his son E. W. Pugin, on which the executed work was actually based, must have been much modified over the years by W. H. Bagot (b. 1880), H. H. Jory (b. 1880), and Lewis Laybourne-Smith (b. 1888), who successively supervised the job. It is certainly no happier an example of High Victorian Gothic than Wardell’s Catholic cathedral in Melbourne.

The Anglican cathedral in Melbourne, St Paul’s, having been begun in 1850 from designs by Butterfield, ought to be finer. But Butterfield had made the drawings as early as 1847, before even he was a High Victorian, and the laggard execution of the church by Joseph Reed evidently entailed much modification of the original designs. Moreover, the spires by John Barr date only from 1934. For the very late Anglican cathedral at Brisbane, St John’s, perhaps the finest of the lot, which was begun in 1901 by F. L. Pearson from earlier designs by his father J. L. Pearson as has already been mentioned, Butterfield had also prepared designs in 1884.

The architecture of the Dominions remained Colonial in spirit, as these notes on a few Australian churches indicate, well into the present century. First the able Frank Wills, moreover, the English-born architect of Montreal Cathedral, and then Fuller & Laver were drawn away from Canada to the United States, where opportunities were greater. Despite the great interest of the Government Buildings at Ottawa, it was in the United States rather than the British Dominions that the High Victorian Gothic proved a stimulus to such highly original achievement as Furness’s in the seventies.

The High Victorian Gothic episode in American architecture balanced almost precisely the Second Empire episode. Both were disowned, even by many of their most successful protagonists, by the mid seventies. It was the Gothic, however, that prepared the way for the more original developments of the last quarter of the century; as has already been stated, those who had practised chiefly in the Second Empire mode continued to take their lead from Paris. Yet there are paradoxes in the situation which must not be ignored. Richardson, the most creative new force in the seventies and eighties, continually urged young aspirants to an architectural career to study at the École des Beaux-Arts as he had done. Charles F. McKim (1847-1909), Richardson’s first really able assistant, was Paris-trained; partly because of that training, it was he who became in the mid eighties the leader of the reaction against the Richardsonian. Sullivan, the first truly great modern architect not alone of America but of the whole western world, was also in part Paris-trained, even though he was always highly critical of the doctrine of the École and much stimulated by Furness. Finally, it was even more the later writings of the French Viollet-le-Duc than those of the English Ruskin that encouraged bold and imaginative thinking about architecture in America in the seventies and eighties when his Entretiens became available in translation and were first widely read.[252]

Were this a history of architectural thought rather than of architecture—that is of what was actually built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—Viollet-le-Duc would play a much larger part. But his production,[253] while not negligible, is curiously ambiguous. His many ‘restorations’ are no contribution to nineteenth-century architecture; rather they represent a serious diminution of authenticity in the great monuments of the past subjected to his ministrations. These include most notably Notre-Dame in Paris, the refurbishing of which he continued alone after the death of Lassus in 1857, and the Château de Pierrefonds, Oise, the rebuilding of which began the next year and continued down to his death in 1879; but the whole list is very long indeed, including Carcassonne, Vézelay, and Saint-Denis, to mention only some of the best known things.

Viollet-le-Duc’s new parish church for the suburb of St-Denis, Saint-Denys-de-l’Estrée in the Boulevard Jules Guesde, built in 1864-7, has considerable interest, however. Unlike most English High Victorian Gothic churches, it is vaulted throughout; but the vaulting does not have that look of a student exercise which characterizes Lassus’s at Saint-Jean-de-Belleville in Paris of the previous decade. The broad square bays of the nave are well lighted by groups of lancets in the clerestory, and there is a sturdy sort of articulation of the elements not unlike that in the early work of Burges (Plate 98). Externally the rather complex plan, with a large rectangular Lady Chapel projecting behind the altar, produces a gawky and confused composition; but the detailing is simple and virile as in the interior. A massive western tower rises over the entrance porch, culminating in a tall slated roof rather than a stone spire. But the plate tracery of the large west window over the porch and the lancets of the stage above are stony enough and have a quite Street-like scale and vigour of form. It is perhaps unfortunate that Viollet-le-Duc built so few new churches; certainly most other French Neo-Gothic work is very inferior to this, as such a large and prominent church as Saint-Epvre at Nancy, begun in 1863 by M.-P. Morey (1805-78), a pupil of Leclerc, well illustrates.

In secular work Viollet-le-Duc was too often content to follow the current Second Empire mode with a good deal of the eclecticism, but little of the plastic boldness, of the English and the Americans. Such more or less Gothic blocks of flats as those that he built in the late fifties and sixties in the Rue de Condorcet and at 15 Rue de Douai in Paris are somewhat more comparable to the secular High Victorian Gothic in England (Plate 101A). These are certainly praiseworthy for the urbanistic politeness with which they fit between more conventional Second Empire neighbours despite their distinctly ‘Victorian’ detail,[254] but there is little originality of conception. On paper Viollet-le-Duc later showed great boldness, however, in certain projects proposing the use of metal structural elements that he published with the second volume of the Entretiens (see Chapter 16).

In the late fifties and sixties the vigour of the ‘Early French’ detailing of certain English architects and a related logic of structural expression then called ‘real’ was often derived in part from a study of Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire. But Shaw’s book of Continental Sketches of 1858 and Nesfield’s similar book of 1862 make evident how intense and how idiosyncratic was their own first-hand study of medieval work across the channel. Certainly the ‘Early French’ detail of the English leaders is generally of higher quality than even Viollet-le-Duc’s best at Saint-Denys-de-l’Estrée.

If there was very little Gothic work done in the third quarter of the century in France comparable in quality or in interest to that of the Anglo-Saxon countries, yet there was a general movement there away from the somewhat mincing attitudes of the forties and early fifties. Just as the Medieval Revival in America, considered in a broad sense, came to its climax in the mature work of Richardson (see Chapter 13)—which is much more Romanesque than Gothic in so far as it leans at all on the past—in France the Romanesquoid work of Vaudremer represents the highest achievement of the period in a non-Renaissance mode (Plate 72A). The same may even be said up to a point of most of the other countries of Europe. Yet the Germanic Rundbogenstil of the third quarter of the century was, for all the size, prominence, and elaboration of such public monuments as Waesemann’s Berlin City Hall or Hansen’s Vienna Waffenmuseum and the real excellence of Herholdt’s Danish work, already a sinking rather than a rising mode.

In Germany and Austria more Neo-Gothic edifices, both secular and ecclesiastical, were built after 1850 than before; several of them have already been mentioned. These are, however, rather examples of contemporary eclecticism than of a concerted movement. In addition to his school and his Rathaus, however, Schmidt built in Vienna some eight Gothic churches ranging in date from the Lazaristenkirche of 1860-2 to the Severinkirche of 1877-8. Most of them are brick-vaulted hall-churches—that is, of the characteristic medieval German plan and section, with aisles of the same height as the nave. However, the largest and most interesting, the Fünfhaus Parish Church of 1868-75, is centrally planned. This is an aisled octagon rising to a ribbed dome with hexagonal chapels grouped around the irregularly polygonal apse (Plate 99B). The spatial complexity of the interior is of real interest, and the walls are painted to suggest polychromatic brickwork of almost English brashness. Two front towers flanking the gabled entrance bay are set close against the dome to provide a very Baroque sort of composition—this is really, therefore, a sort of Sant’ Agnese in Agone or Karlskirche carried out with a G. G. Scott vocabulary of Neo-Gothic elements.

In Hungary the eighties saw a very belated manifestation of secular Neo-Gothic. The Parliament House, begun in 1883 by Imre Steindl (1839-1902) and completed in 1902, was surely inspired by Barry’s in London begun nearly a half-century earlier, but in character it is (not surprisingly) more like Schmidt’s Vienna Rathaus. Thus did outlying countries in the later decades of the century continue to take up modes long obsolescent in the major architectural centres.[255]

The Gothic of C. F. Arnold (1823-90) at Dresden, as seen in his secular Kreuzschule of 1864-5 or the two-towered Sophienkirche of the same years, is inferior to Schmidt’s, both in command of the idiom and in architectonic organization, as indeed is most such German work of these decades. The Johanniskirche in Dresden of 1874-8 by G. L. Möckel (1838-1915), however, has a rather fine tower set in the transeptal position so much favoured in Victorian England. This is bold in scale and carefully detailed in a literate twelfth-century—not to say ‘Early French’—way much as Burges or Pearson might have designed it in England. More characteristic of German work of these decades is the Munich Rathaus, built in 1867-74 by G. J. von Hauberrisser (1841-1922) and extended by him in 1899-1909. Excessively spiky, this seems almost to have borrowed back from G. G. Scott the more Germanic features of his Broad Sanctuary terrace in London of fifteen years earlier. But the Neo-Gothic of the seventies and eighties in Germany is in general no more aggressive and gawky than the popular Meistersinger mode that revived so turgidly the forms of the Northern Renaissance (see Chapter 10).

Holland, which made almost no significant architectural contribution in the first half of the nineteenth century, now produced in P. J. H. Cuijpers (1827-1921) a sort of Dutch Viollet-le-Duc. In addition to undertaking important restorations, he built many vast new Gothic churches of brick which he exposed once more in reaction against the earlier nineteenth-century practice of stucco-coating. Cuijpers was learned and ambitious, and in such work he could be rather more original than Viollet-le-Duc in France, if less so perhaps than Schmidt in Austria. His Vondelkerk, a church of 1870 near the Vondel Park in Amsterdam, is not centrally planned like Schmidt’s Fünfhaus church in Vienna, but he obtained a somewhat similar spatial effect by making the crossing octagonal. The brickwork of the piers and the vaults is very richly treated but in a fashion as much polytonal as polychromatic. The banding is in bricks of different sizes and textures rather than of different colours, and the result has something of the subtlety of the interior of White’s Aberdeen Park church in London.

A larger and later Amsterdam church by Cuijpers, the Maria Magdalenakerk in the Zaanstraat of 1887, is considerably more impressive, both inside and out. Occupying one of those narrow triangular sites so often assigned to important urban churches in this period, the exterior builds up grandly to the rather severe crossing tower at the rear. Inside, Cuijpers made the most of the difficulties of the site also. The east end is conventionally Gothic in plan, and the choir here is brick-vaulted, as is the Vondelkerk throughout. But the taller nave, covered with a wooden roof of ogival section, is much more effective spatially because of the way it is widened by triangular elements at the front where the aisles are cut off owing to the narrowing of the site (Plate 101B). The later painted decorations in this church are harmonious in tone with the brickwork, and the whole has a breadth of attack comparable to some of the best English churches of the seventies, such as Pearson’s in Kilburn or Edmund Scott’s St Bartholomew’s, Brighton, without resembling any of them very much.

Curiously enough for so dedicated a church-builder, Cuijpers’s secular work is more conspicuous, and hence better known, than are his churches. The two largest and most prominent nineteenth-century buildings of Amsterdam are both by him. In these, the Rijksmuseum built in 1877-85 (Plate 101C) and the Central Station of 1881-9, he moved away from the emulation of thirteenth- or fourteenth-century ecclesiastical Gothic towards a more elastic sixteenth-century sort of design, rather similar to the English mode of these decades known as ‘Pont Street Dutch’ (see Chapter 12).

The similarity to the Northern Renaissance mode of this period in Germany is nearly as great, as also to such somewhat later Scandinavian buildings as Clason’s Northern Museum in Stockholm and Nyrop’s Town Hall in Copenhagen (Plate 173A). But Cuijpers’s touch is lighter than that of the Germans, and his precedent rather more Late Gothic than Mannerist, while his two chief works precede those that they most resemble in Sweden and Denmark by a decade or more. In both cases the frank incorporation of iron-and-glass elements is notable, a vast shed at the station and two almost equally vast covered courts in the museum. Above all, being the Gothic Revivalist he was, Cuijpers saw to it that the craftsmanship was excellent throughout; while his handling of scale, though ambiguous as in much work of these decades everywhere, is surprisingly successful. Both are very large buildings, placed in isolation where they can be seen from a distance and with carefully studied silhouettes varied by towers and other skyline features; yet the membering is delicate and almost domestic, quite as in the rather comparable English work of George (Plate 104B) or Collcutt (see Chapter 12).

In Italy projects of restoration led, as elsewhere, to the designing of certain fairly ambitious new façades in Gothic to complete medieval churches. The most conspicuous is that of the cathedral of Florence. After many abortive earlier moves, this was finally begun by Emilio de Fabris (1808-83) in 1866, when Florence became briefly the capital of Italy, and completed only in 1887. The earlier and less successful façade of Santa Croce in Florence had been carried out in 1857-63 by Niccoló Matas (1798-1872). It is characteristic of the international architectural scene in these decades that neither of these carefully archaeological compositions in polychrome Italian Gothic comes alive in the way that Italianate High Victorian Gothic often did in the hands of English architects, or even American ones, in the fifties and sixties.

Churches were built for Anglicans in most of the principal cities of Europe in the mid nineteenth century, usually by English architects and always in Victorian Gothic. Sometimes, as in the case of the Crimean Memorial Church by Street[256] at Istanbul and Shaw’s English Church at Lyons, these were by the most distinguished English designers of the day, but more often they were by hacks who lived abroad and specialized in such work. Among the ‘English churches’ of this period that provided good samples of the High Victorian Gothic for foreigners—many were still to all intents and purposes Early Victorian—are two by Street[257] in Rome, one for the English community, the other not ‘English’ at all in fact but built for American Episcopalians. The former, All Saints’, in the Via del Babuino, with a much later tower not by Street, provides internally a moderately successful example of his later work, although it is unimpressive and largely invisible externally. It was begun in 1880, a year before Street’s death, and opened in 1885.

Far finer is St Paul’s, the American church, prominently located among the contemporary banks and blocks of flats of the Via Nazionale and built in 1873-6. Boldly banded in brick and stone and with a tall square campanile at the front corner, this is indeed a richer and more striking example of an Italian Gothic basilica than the Middle Ages ever produced in Rome (Plate 100). The interior, with a rich apse mosaic by Burne-Jones on a glittering gold ground, has an originality and a coherence that is quite lacking in such Italian churches as were redecorated in the later nineteenth century. Late though this is in Street’s œuvre, it remains one of his best works.

If the English High Victorian Gothic was to some extent an article of export—and, of course, this account has hardly touched on the vast outlying areas of the British Empire, notably including India, to which it was exported in the greatest quantity—it was nevertheless largely without real influence outside the United States and the British Dominions. In the world picture, it was the British architectural critics of this period, Ruskin and Morris, who would have a vital influence, but that influence came for the most part rather later, around 1890 (see Chapter 16). Cuijpers, however, was a reader of Ruskin from the fifties.

Still to be discussed is the early work of one great architect, also reputedly a reader of Ruskin, whose career began in the seventies with a sharp revulsion from the Second Empire mode towards the Neo-Gothic. The Spanish (or more precisely Catalan) architect Antoni Gaudí i Cornet (1852-1926) was one of the most intensely personal talents that either the nineteenth or the twentieth century has produced. His style hardly matured before the nineties, and what are generally considered his typical works must be discussed later in connexion with the Art Nouveau (see Chapter 16). But what he had accomplished already in the seventies and eighties can be better appreciated here in relation to the contemporary work of those decades in other countries.

Gaudí’s earliest work was at the Parc de la Ciutadella in Barcelona, laid out in 1872, where he assisted the master of works Eduardo Fontseré, while still a student, in various projects for its embellishment. The elaborate Cascade there, incorporating an Aquarium, on which he worked in 1877-82 derives in the main from Espérandieu’s at the Palais Longchamps in Marseilles. But some of the detail, both plastic and incised, has a flavour more comparable to that of the wildest and most eclectic English and American Second Empire work of the previous decade than to anything French.

The first commission for which Gaudí was wholly responsible is the house of Don Manuel Vicens at 24-26 Carrer de les Carolines in Barcelona. This was erected in 1878-80, immediately upon his graduation from the local Escuela Superior de Arquitectura, and in it no trace of Second Empire influence, French or international, remains. A large suburban villa built of rubble masonry liberally banded with polychrome tiles, the Casa Vicens passes beyond the extravagances of a Teulon or a Lamb in the sixties into a world of fantasy that only one or two High Victorian designers such as the Scottish Frederick T. Pilkington (1832-98) ever entered. Yet Gaudí’s general inspiration came definitely from the medieval past. In Spain that past included the semi-Islamic Mudéjar, however, and much of the detailing which appears most original to non-Spanish eyes is, in fact, dependent on local precedents of one sort or another. For example, the floral tiles are merely what the Iberian world knows as azulejos and has continued to use down to the present time, especially in Portugal and Brazil (see Chapter 25).

In all the flamboyance of the decoration of the Casa Vicens, the most personal note is in the ironwork. This is naturalistic in theme and bold in scale; it also includes curious linear elements that wave and bend in a way which is more than a little premonitory of the Art Nouveau of the nineties (see Chapter 16). The entrance grille is a masterpiece of decorative art of this period, rivalled only by some of Morris’s contemporary stained glass.

The very utilitarian industrial warehouse for La Obrera Mataronense of 1878-82 at Mataró, with its great arched principals of laminated wood, should be mentioned to balance the Casa Vicens. Here Gaudí’s prowess as an imaginative constructor—almost a straight engineer—was very evident, as also the fact that the unfamiliar forms he continually used—the shape of the arches here was parabolic not semicircular or pointed—were not a matter of personal crankiness but selected for statical reasons: Gothic in theory, that is, like some of Soufflot’s vaulting, though not very Gothic in appearance.

In 1884, however, Gaudí was made director of works for a large new Gothic church in Barcelona, and from this time forward a considerable part of his activity, extending down through his restoration of the cathedral of Palma on the island of Mallorca in 1900-14, was that of a Gothic Revivalist, if an increasingly unconventional one. Towards such a career his own intense religiosity inclined him quite as much as was the case with Pugin and reputedly also with Cuijpers—Viollet-le-Duc, by exception, was strongly anti-clerical. Unlike Pugin’s or Cuijpers’s, however, Gaudí’s career as an ecclesiastical architect was rather unproductive. Yet from the first he designed and executed church furnishings and, while still a student in 1875-7, he assisted the architect Francesc de Paula del Villar i Carmona (1845-1922) on a project for adding a porch to the monastery church of Montsarrat.

In 1881 Villar was made architect of the proposed Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family (Sagrada Familia),[258] for which a large square site had been obtained between the Carrers de Mallorca, de Marina, de Provença, and de Sardenya in an outlying part of Barcelona, and the construction of the crypt of a great cruciform Gothic church was started in 1882. Two years later Gaudí took over charge of the work, as has been said, completing the crypt by 1891 almost entirely according to Villar’s original and quite conventionally thirteenth-fourteenth-century Gothic design. There followed the construction of the outer walls only of the chevet; these were finished by 1893. The further history of the church will be considered later; for Gaudí’s style underwent extraordinary changes in the nineties as he designed and built one transept façade of the church and its towers—which is about all that exists above ground even today (see Chapter 17).

Contemporaneously with Gaudí’s construction of the crypt and the chevet walls of the Sagrada Familia came four secular works, two of them also quite Neo-Gothic in character and two others of very great originality. The Bishop’s Palace at Astorga of 1887-93 and the Fernández-Arbós house, known as the Casa de los Botines, in the Plaza de San Marcelo at León of 1892-4 might well be mistaken for provincial High Victorian Gothic done in England or America twenty or thirty years earlier. But the city mansion of Don Eusebio Güell at 3-5 Carrer Nou de la Rambla (now Conde del Asalto) in Barcelona, built in 1885-9, is an edifice of the greatest distinction, rivalled for quality in its period only by the very finest late work of Richardson in America (see Chapter 13). The Teresian College at 41 Carrer de Ganduxer in Barcelona is also quite remarkable in its simpler way.

Far suaver than his earlier Casa Vicens, the Palau Güell is quite as strikingly novel all the same. At the base yawn a pair of parabolic arches, their tops filled above a plain reticulated grille with sinuous seaweed-like ornament of the most extravagant virtuosity (Plate 96B). The ‘Dragon Gate’ of the Finca Güell of 1887 in the Avenida Pedralbes is still stranger, with a nightmare quality which those of the house in town happily lack. On either side of the entrance arches and in the projecting first storey the façade of the Palau Güell is no more than a rather plain rectangular grid of stone mullions and transoms. In scale this grid is more like Parris’s Boston granite fronts of the twenties than like English window-walls, but it is detailed in a cranky medievalizing way that is more comparable to Webb’s handling of stonework (Figure 17). The rear façade towards the court includes in the middle a broad bay-window with curved corners protected by sunscreens as original but less fantastic than the grilles at the entrance. The most extraordinary features of the exterior, however, are the chimney-pots rising in profusion above the flat roof like an exhibition of abstract sculpture and entirely covered with a mosaic of irregular fragments of glass, rubble, or coloured tiles. In them the extravagance of his earlier houses was continued, and such terminal features remained characteristic of all his later secular work.

The interiors of the Palau Güell are extremely sumptuous. There is much use of marble arcades of parabolic arches carried on round columns, both arches and columns being detailed with the greatest mathematical elegance and simplicity, yet with considerable variety. Some of the ceilings are of marble slabs carried by visible iron beams, but in the principal apartments there are incredibly elaborate confections of woodwork in the Moorish tradition.

The College of Santa Teresa de Jesús, built in 1889-94 immediately after the Palau Güell, is naturally much more modest than that great merchant’s palace, which continues the line of those that late medieval and Renaissance magnates often built. Rubble walls banded and stripped with brickwork are pierced alternately with ranges of narrow windows and with small square ventilators closed with quatrefoil grilles. The widely spaced windows are capped with steep parabolic ‘arches’ formed by cantilevering inward successive brick courses. The third storey is all of brickwork panelled with blind ‘arches’ between the windows and carried up into large, flat, triangular finials along the skyline. Less ingratiating than the Palau Güell with its luxurious use of fine materials inside and out, this college building is equally regular in composition and no more Gothic in appearance to a non-Spanish eye; in fact, however, it leans even more heavily on Mozarab and Mudéjar precedent than does the Casa Vicens. A certain amount of relatively plain wrought-iron grillework recalls that at the entrances of the earlier houses.

Only perhaps in England and America did the line of descent from the Gothic Revival lead so far away from the standard medievalism of the mid century in the seventies and eighties. But these early works of Gaudí represent only a part—to most critics the less important half—of his production. For strangeness they can be matched in work of equal consequence within this period only by Sullivan’s earliest commercial façades in Chicago (see Chapter 14). Teulon and Harris had reformed by the seventies; Lamb and Pilkington were forgotten. In character Gaudí’s work of the seventies and eighties could hardly be more different from the mature style of the English Shaw. Yet Shaw, at his occasional best, could compete with Gaudí in the quality of his achievement; while his influence, both at home and in the United States, was of very considerable historical importance, as Gaudí’s was not, even in Spain (see Chapters 12, 13, and 15).

For all that Gaudí was actually represented at the Paris Exhibition of 1878—by a glovemaker’s vitrine!—and later by pavilions designed for the Compañía Transatlántica in the Naval Exhibition of 1887 at Cadiz and in the Barcelona International Exhibition of the following year, his work was hardly known at all except to his compatriots before the nineties. In the mid twentieth century, however, his reputation is still rising, as the flood of new publications of the last decade makes evident. The reasons for this will be suggested later, since they apply chiefly to the work that he did after 1900 (see Chapters 16 and 20).

In the European picture as a whole a less notable shift of direction occurred around 1870 than in England and America. There was naturally continuity in the Vienna of Francis Joseph, since the Imperial government called the tune in Austrian architecture and the King-Emperor’s reign went on without a break—indeed, it lasted for another generation and more. What is surprising is that the end of the Second Empire and the beginning of the Third Republic brought so little change in France. There was, of course, a short hiatus in production like that which followed the fall of the first Napoleon. As around 1820, however, so around 1875 the story picks up again almost as if there had been no break at all. Gradually interest in exposed metal construction, in decline since the fifties, revived; by the time of the Paris Exhibition of 1889 French feats of metal construction, not so much the Galerie des Machines as the Eiffel Tower, became the talk of the world (see Chapter 16).

In the fugue-like composition of nineteenth-century architectural history different themes have differing durations. The English theme of High Victorian Gothic, picked up in any case only by the Anglo-Saxon sections of the orchestra, came effectively to an end with the early seventies; the Second Empire theme, whether it be considered in a specialized sense or in a broader one, was picked up at least selectively by the whole western world and not least boldly by the Anglo-American section; moreover, it continued in most countries, with some modulation, for at least a decade longer than the High Victorian Gothic. Yet both in England and America, the important new themes of the seventies and eighties were rooted not in the Second Empire but in the Victorian Gothic, even though they represent something much more original than mere modulations of that earlier theme.

The third quarter of the nineteenth century is notable for the stylistic diversity of its production. In principle there may, perhaps, be no more difference between Visconti’s and Lefuel’s New Louvre and a Butterfield church than between Nash’s Blaise Hamlet and his terraces around Regent’s Park, to cite merely work by one early nineteenth-century architect. Yet thanks to the fugal character of the general historical development, which meant that new modes were added to the architectural repertory—as they had been at least since the twenties—more rapidly than old modes were dropped, the over-all picture became extremely complicated after 1850. It belies the most valid and idiosyncratic achievements of this period, however, to stress too much its apparently limitless eclecticism.[259] The account given in the last four chapters undoubtedly exaggerates the importance of certain modes, if that importance be measured statistically in terms of quantity of production. Qualitative considerations have led to a drastic selectivity, emphasizing relatively limited but vital aspects of architectural production at the expense of others that were far more ubiquitous but generally very dull. With different criteria of selection, using different standards of architectural quality—attainment of archaeological plausibility, say; or success or failure in the incorporation of new technical developments; or realization of programmatic aims—several very different pictures could be, and indeed frequently have been,[260] given of the architecture of the western world in these decades.

At the expense of emphasizing architectural developments peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon world in this same, possibly unbalanced, fashion the next chapter is organized around the career, after 1870, of Norman Shaw, whose early work in the High Victorian Gothic has already received some attention. The chapter following that centres on the achievement of the American architect Richardson, whose somewhat parallel beginnings have also been described in this chapter.

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12. NORMAN SHAW AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

IN England and America there followed immediately upon the ‘High Styles’ of the fifties and sixties phases of stylistic development that cannot readily be matched in the other countries of the western world. This is true both of the quality of the achievement and also of its significance for what came after. Beginning just before 1870 in England and but little later in the United States, these two phases developed in far from identical ways. In both cases their conventional names, ‘Queen Anne’ and ‘Romanesque Revival’, are misnomers. It was a long time before the Queen Anne of the seventies actually became a revival of early eighteenth-century architecture in the same sense as the Greek, Gothic, or Renaissance Revivals. The supposed Romanesque Revival in America of this period was not very archaeological either. It is therefore less inaccurate to label these modes by the names of their principal protagonists: ‘Shavian’ for Richard Norman Shaw (even though that proper adjective refers more familiarly to George Bernard Shaw) and ‘Richardsonian’ for Henry Hobson Richardson. Shaw, however, shares responsibility for the effectiveness of the mutation away from the High Victorian with other men, notably his early partner Nesfield, Webb, Godwin, and J. J. Stevenson.[261] Of all this group, Shaw was unquestionably the most successful, the most typical, and the most influential, though not the most original.

Except for Pugin, no architect since Robert Adam had so much effect on English—and for that matter also on American—production. Moreover, his influence lasted for some thirty-five years, rather longer than did Adam’s. Yet it is not possible to define the Shavian mode clearly as it is the Adamesque or the Puginian. An architectural Picasso, Shaw had many divergent manners which he developed successively, but of which none—except the High Victorian Gothic—was ever entirely dropped. Each of these manners, down to the very end of his long practice, found in turn a following. His latest and most conspicuous work, the Piccadilly Hotel, built in London in 1905-8 between Piccadilly and the Regent Street Quadrant (Plate 107), is more characteristic of the Edwardian Age of the opening twentieth century than his early church at Bingley is of the High Victorian. Outside church architecture the intervening Late Victorian can hardly be defined better than in terms of his various manners, and even in church architecture he had a real contribution to make, if a lesser reputation than Pearson or Bodley.

Yet Shaw cannot be rated with Soane or Schinkel as a nineteenth-century architect of absolutely the first rank; nor yet with his American contemporary Richardson, even though Richardson’s career came to an end a score of years before his. Shaw’s work reflects all too clearly, despite his own vast and sanguine assurance, the general uncertainties of the years after 1870. Webb, though less successful and famous, eventually had more influence, not so much on English architecture in general as on the more creative and original men of the next generation. The later history of European architecture would be much the same—if not that of American architecture—had Shaw never existed; but the modern architecture that first came into being after 1900 in various countries of Europe owed something directly, and even more indirectly, to Webb. In this way Richardson also has more significance than Shaw, despite his lack of influence abroad, for Sullivan and Wright in America both learned much from him.

Norman Shaw was born in Edinburgh in 1831. Brought early to London, he was taken on in his early teens by Burn, the Edinburgh architect then settled in London, who had so great a success designing Jacobethan and Scottish Baronial mansions for the high aristocracy in the forties and fifties. Shaw also studied at the Royal Academy, winning in 1853 their Silver Medal, and in the next year their Gold Medal, with the award of a Travelling Studentship that took him to Germany, Italy, and France. The project which won him the first medal was a surprising production for its period, and quite without relation to his own High Victorian Gothic work of the next decade that has been described earlier (see Chapter 11). A vast design for a college with central domed block and side pavilions loaded with giant orders, this project is more Vanbrugh-like than Second Empire. In some sense Shaw’s career was to come full circle stylistically; but even in the Gaiety Theatre in the Strand in London of 1902-3 and the still later Piccadilly Hotel he would hardly be as whole-heartedly Neo-Baroque again.

In 1858 Shaw published, as has been mentioned before, what is perhaps the most attractive of High Victorian Gothic source-books, Architectural Sketches from the Continent, based on his European studies; doubtless on the strength of this book he became at this time, or shortly after, Street’s principal assistant—chief draughtsman, one might call it—in succession to Webb.[262] There he remained for four years, leaving in 1862 to form a partnership with Nesfield, whom he had first known in the early fifties in Burn’s office. As has already been noted, Nesfield was the son of Barry’s collaborator in garden design for all his major country house commissions. Younger than Shaw, Nesfield had gone to Burn’s office in 1850 a year or two after leaving Eton, and in 1853 had moved to the office of his uncle Anthony Salvin, another successful builder of aristocratic country houses. Nesfield, in this year 1862, issued a book rather like Shaw’s of four years earlier as has been mentioned in connexion with his work for Lord Craven at Combe Abbey. Other aristocrats with whom he had connexions through his father soon began to employ him on more modest jobs.

Building lodges and other accessories to great country estates, and in 1864 one in Regent’s Park where everyone might appreciate his highly personal touch, Nesfield revived in effect the Picturesque Cottage mode of half a century earlier. But the materials he used were more various,[263] including tile-hanging and pargetting, and his designs had a general finesse that was much more craftsmanlike than those of the slapdash Nash and his rivals in this genre (Plate 50A). In Nesfield’s first major work, Cloverley Hall in Shropshire, begun in 1865, several characteristic features appear for which his lodges hardly prepared the way (see Chapter 15). There a tall great hall provided the principal interior, and the areas of mullioned windows in the Tudor tradition were so extensive as to constitute real ‘window-walls’ (Figure 24). His very refined and ingenious ornamentation at Cloverley, some of it of Japanese inspiration, has been mentioned.

Even earlier, in 1862, when Japanese art was just beginning to be an inspiration to advanced painters in Paris and in London and the Japanese Government first sent examples of characteristic work to an international exhibition, Godwin, who was just at that point throwing off the influence of Ruskin, had stripped bare the interiors of his own house in Bristol and decorated them only with a few Japanese prints asymmetrically hung. By 1866 Godwin was designing wallpapers of notably Japanese character for Jeffry & Co. and from 1868 ‘Anglo-Japanese’ furniture for the manufacturer William Watt.[264] But japonisme is only a minor theme of this period,[265] and it hardly influenced Shaw at all.

Half a century earlier the prestige of a ranking novelist, Sir Walter Scott, had helped to launch one of the most popular Picturesque modes, the Scottish Baronial, when he asked Blore to imitate the old Border castles in designing his house at Abbotsford. Now in 1861 Thackeray, a novelist many of whose novels were set, not in the Middle Ages, but in early eighteenth-century England and Virginia, designed for himself a house in Palace Green in London opposite Kensington Palace, much of which is more or less of that particular period. This house echoes the modest red-brick manor houses of the time of Queen Anne on both sides of the Atlantic, but it could hardly be less plausible. At the same time Wellington College by John Shaw (1803-70), which was begun in 1856, was reaching completion in a much richer, almost Second Empire, version of the Wren style of 1700.

The serious adumbration of a Queen Anne mode really began a few years later with a small public commission of Nesfield’s. His lodge at Kew Gardens, designed in 1866 and built in 1867, though simple, is already almost an archaeological exercise in early eighteenth-century[266] brickwork (Figure 18). This Kew lodge he followed up a few years later with a big but remote country house, Kinmel Park near Abergele in Wales, built in 1871-4 though possibly designed a bit earlier. To this we will be returning shortly. Shaw had nothing to do with Kinmel Park, since his partnership with Nesfield came to an end in 1868; that was just after the completion of Cloverley Hall on which he certainly collaborated even if his personal contribution there cannot now be readily distinguished. Already in 1866, before Shaw parted from Nesfield, however, his own career had opened with the designing of the Bingley church (Plate 94A) and of Glen Andred, near Withyham in Sussex, a house of great originality of character (Plate 102B).

Glen Andred is little more related to the new Queen Anne mode of the Kew lodge than it is to the Gothic of the Bingley church. It does, however, seem to derive somewhat from earlier Nesfield work, or possibly from Devey. Where the High Victorian Gothic had rejected English precedent in favour of Italian and French models, this first Sussex house of Shaw’s is resolutely regional in character. The tile-hung walls above a red-brick ground storey, the white-painted wooden casements, almost as extensive as the ‘window-walls’ of Cloverley, the loose asymmetrical organization of the massing are all related to a local Sussex and Surrey vernacular of no particular period (Plate 102B). The entrance front is more formal, carefully balanced if not precisely symmetrical, and here the pargetting in the central gable is of Jacobethan character. But the great stair-window and the graceful massing of the tiled roofs, quite in the finest tradition of the Picturesque but handled with a new ease and casualness, are more important elements of Shaw’s first manner, which can be called ‘Shavian Manorial’. The hall across the front between the two projecting wings is modest in size, with the principal living rooms loosely grouped round it. Thus this may be considered an early example of what I have rather clumsily called the ‘agglutinative plan’, but as it was never published the extent of its actual influence must remain uncertain.

There was little logic to Shaw’s regionalism. Already in 1868 he was applying his Sussex vocabulary of materials and forms to the Cookridge Convalescent Hospital at Horsforth near Leeds in stony Yorkshire. In general, however, he kept this manner for work near London, using it even as late as 1894 for a house called The Hallams near Bramley in Surrey. He also introduced tile-hanging on some of his houses in London such as West House, at 118 Campden Hill Road, of 1877 and Walton House in Walton Street of 1885 as well as—rather more appropriately—on the suburban Hampstead house that he built in the same year for Kate Greenaway at 39 Frognal.

Shaw’s first client had been a painter, J. C. Horsley, R.A., for whom he made some alterations in the early sixties and whose son later entered his office. Glen Andred was for another painter, E. W. Cooke, later R.A., and West House was for George Boughton, R.A. Kate Greenaway, better known today than these forgotten academicians, was an illustrator of children’s books much patronized by Ruskin. F. W. Goodall, R.A. (1870), Marcus Stone, R.A. (1876), Luke Fildes, R.A. (1877), Edwin Long, R.A. (1878, and again in 1888), Frank Holl, R.A. (1881), are other successful painters and fellow academicians—Shaw became an A.R.A. himself in 1872 and an R.A. in 1877—for whom he built houses (with the dates of the commissions). All but Goodall’s house at Harrow Weald were either in Melbury Road in Kensington in London or else in Fitzjohn’s Avenue near his own Hampstead house of 1875 at 6 Ellerdale Road. Where the prosperous artists, themselves presumably aping the aristocracy, led, magnates and City men were now quick to follow. The Newcastle steelmaster Sir William Armstrong had Shaw build Cragside near Rothbury in Northumberland for him as early as 1870.

Leyswood, near Withyham in Sussex, begun in 1868 at the same time as the Cookridge Hospital, was one of Shaw’s most influential works (Plate 123). More archaeologically manorial than Glen Andred, it provided a mass of suggestions that English and American architects borrowed again and again over the next twenty years and more. Because of Shaw’s later leadership, it is natural for posterity to note what was new here; contemporaries, used to the wild vagaries of the High Victorian Gothic, saw Leyswood rather as a reaction against the ‘modernism’ of the fifties and earlier sixties. Tile-hung upper storeys and barge-boarded gables, richly half-timbered—the half-timbering a mere sham applied over solid brickwork!—long banks of casements that approach the twentieth-century ‘ribbon-window’ and great mullioned bays providing ‘window-walls’ as extensive as Nesfield’s at Cloverley clothed an interior that was not at all medieval but a more developed example than Glen Andred of the ‘agglutinative plan’ (Figure 19). The main reception rooms were grouped about a central hall, from one side of which rose elaborate stairs arranged in several flights about an open well. Webb had already essayed this sort of planning in a more orderly way at Arisaig begun in 1863 (Figure 23); but it was Shaw’s version, not Webb’s, that was generally imitated (see Chapter 15).

Shortly after Leyswood, and following fairly closely its manner although with fewer Late Gothic elements of detail, came the house later called Grim’s Dyke built at Harrow Weald in 1870-2 for F. W. Goodall, afterwards the country house of the composer W. S. Gilbert, and Preen Manor in Shropshire also designed in 1870. Then followed Hopedene, near Holmbury in Surrey, and Boldre Grange, near Lymington in Hampshire, in 1873; Wispers, Midhurst, in Sussex, in 1875; Chigwell Hall in Essex, and Pierrepoint, near Farnham in Surrey, in 1876; Merrist Wood near Guildford in Surrey, and Denham at Totteridge in Hertfordshire, in 1877; and so on down into the nineties.

After their showing each year at the Royal Academy Exhibition Shaw’s brilliant pen-and-ink perspectives of these houses were published photo-lithographically in the professional press; moreover, from 1874 the plans were usually given as well, the first published being that of Hopedene. Not surprisingly these were the most influential of Shaw’s works abroad, providing in the late seventies and early eighties one of the most important sources of the American ‘Shingle Style’ (see Chapter 15). Beside them, moreover, Webb’s more prominent London works of the late sixties, the house for George Howard, later Earl of Carlisle, built in 1868 near Thackeray’s in Palace Green, Kensington, and the small office building at 19 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, also of 1868, appear somewhat cranky and overstudied, still rather too Gothic in detail and lacking the comfortable air of his country-house work. However, the modest London studio-house at 14 Holland Park Road, Kensington, which was designed in 1864 and built in 1865 for Val Prinsep, like Morris and Spencer Stanhope one of the crew of artists who worked on the decoration of the Oxford Union, must have been more like the Red House and Benfleet Hall before it was recurrently enlarged by Webb in the following decades. Another London studio-house for the water-colour painter G. B. Boyce at 35 Glebe Place, Chelsea, which was begun in 1869, is in rather better condition today and quite exemplary in its quiet way despite some changes by Webb and others.

At this point came Nesfield’s Kinmel Park. Shaw and other advanced architects must have been aware of the character of the designs for this house from 1870 or 71, even though it was neither shown at the Royal Academy nor published then, and took some four years to complete. Kinmel is much more complicated stylistically than Nesfield’s Kew lodge of 1866-7, but it offers the next step in the development of the new Queen Anne mode. At first sight it might appear to be related rather to Second Empire work, for the main block on the entrance side is symmetrical, high-roofed, and dominated by a bold central pavilion. Moreover, the detailing of the red-brick façades with their profuse light-coloured stone trim is almost as French of Louis XIII’s time as it is English of Queen Anne’s day. The garden front, which is carefully ordered but not symmetrical, and the service wing to the south, much more loosely composed and with a profusion of small-paned double-hung sash-windows and dormers, are more definitely English and also more original.

Webb had been using such windows and even approaching the Late Stuart vernacular in his houses for a year or two before Kinmel was begun. This was most evident at Trevor Hall (Figure 25), built at Oakleigh Park near Barnet in Hertfordshire in 1868-70, for that modest country house was quite symmetrical in design although almost devoid of any sort of ‘period’ detail, whether Gothic or Late Stuart. To more acclaim, Webb had also been responsible for designing with William Morris a little earlier, in 1866 and in 1867, the Armoury in St James’s Palace and the Refreshment Room in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The former, particularly, is a very original masterpiece of nineteenth-century decoration, hardly at all related to the contemporary High Victorian Gothic, yet reflecting the eighteenth century only as regards the treatment of the wainscoting and the door and window casings (which may be of eighteenth-century date). The Refreshment Room is also very fine and now accessible to the public (Plate 97B).

Just after 1870, while Kinmel was still in construction, the main line of development moved from the country into London. The Education Act of 1870 required the building of innumerable new schools, particularly by the London School Board. Among the architects successful in the first competitions that were held for designs for these schools were E. R. Robson (1835-1917) and J. J. Stevenson (1831-1908); they used a non-Gothic vocabulary in London stock bricks trimmed with red bricks cut or moulded along seventeenth-century vernacular lines.[267] This mode was not unrelated to the more definitely Queen Anne models provided by the Kew lodge and by Kinmel, but the new London schools were more irregular in composition and naturally much more cheaply built. Robson, appointed architect to the London School Board in 1871, soon made this mode the official one for schools in London County and this, of course, before long influenced Board School design nationally.

In 1871 Stevenson, like Shaw a Scot out to make a London reputation, built a new house for himself in what is now Bayswater Road. This he named the Red House, like Morris’s at Bexley Heath of a decade earlier, in order to call attention to the fact that its brickwork was not covered with stucco but exposed like that of the Thackeray and Howard houses in Palace Green. In fact, however, it was built like the Board Schools of brownish stock bricks with red-brick detail elaborately moulded, gauged, and cut in the Late Stuart way. Although Stevenson’s house had little of the real elegance of Kinmel or the natural ease of Shaw’s manors, its novelty and its fairly conspicuous location would have attracted attention in any case. But Stevenson, a very accomplished publicist, saw the advantage of proclaiming for this hybrid mode a name, ‘Queen Anne’, which was evidently no less applicable to Nesfield’s Kew lodge and Kinmel or even to his friend Robson’s schools. Thus was a revival formally launched.

Two new buildings in London by Shaw, begun in 1872 and in 1873, were definitely in the new mode. Only at this point, indeed, does the term Queen Anne begin to make any sense as applied to Shaw’s work. Despite the valid claim to priority that Stevenson made for his Red House in a paper read in 1874 at the Architects’ Conference ‘On the recent reaction of taste in architecture’ in which he claimed the Queen Anne mode was a ‘Re-Renaissance’ (sic), and his own relative success from this time on as a fashionable London house-architect, the Queen Anne became Shaw’s from the moment that he first turned his hand to it in 1872. Whether the original idea came to him from Devey or from Nesfield—he had probably worked himself on the drawings for the Kew lodge—or was merely an attempt to outbid a rival Scotsman on the London scene makes no real difference.

New Zealand Chambers, the office building which Shaw erected in 1872-3 in Leadenhall Street in the City, was certainly totally unlike anything the Age of Anne ever saw except for the cut-brick detailing of the pedimented entrance. Boldly projecting red brick piers divided the tall façade into three bays, while between them rose oriel windows broken by ornately sculptured spandrels imitated from the mid-seventeenth-century ones on Sparrow’s House at Ipswich. The small panes and thick white sash-bars of these windows made the scale surprisingly domestic in contrast to the usual boldness of High Victorian commercial work, and the whole composition was effectively tied together by an ornately pargeted cove cornice that ran straight across the top (see Chapter 14). Above this the rather simple range of continuous dormers in the roof was very much in the spirit of the ‘ribbon-window’ bands on his country houses.

So dazzled were contemporaries by the lush exuberance of Shaw’s ornament on the spandrels and the cove that they hardly noticed the way in which the bold articulation of this façade by the brick piers, with the areas between nearly all window, frankly reflecting the internal iron construction, provided most satisfactory lighting for the offices; nor that Shaw, while keeping his scale intimate in all the detailing, was not afraid to stress the verticality of his façade by avoiding emphasis on the storey lines. Only the weaker features of the design—the arbitrary asymmetry of the entrance, the profuse ornamentation, and the underscaling—were generally imitated.

Lowther Lodge, built in 1873-4, a large free-standing mansion in Kensington Gore, still survives—it is now the home of the Royal Geographical Society—as New Zealand Chambers does not. Here the vocabulary of cut and moulded brick is more consistently Late Stuart, although the general composition, with many gables, two tall polygonal bay-windows, quantities of dormers, and tall fluted chimney stacks, is as romantically complex as that of Shaw’s manors in Sussex and Surrey. However, both the front and the rear façades, when studied, will be found to approximate symmetry in their principal portions as does the front of Glen Andred; and the main rooms inside, the hall at the front and the drawing-room behind, are quite symmetrical and have recognizably Early Georgian (rather than specifically Queen Anne) fireplaces and door and window casings, although their grouping is still, so to say, agglutinative.

In a Surrey house of the same date, 1873, like Trevor Hall unhappily demolished, Webb moved rather farther in a similar direction. Joldwynds near Dorking was quite as symmetrical as Trevor Hall but even less Gothic. The vocabulary of tile-hanging on the upper storeys, with weather-boarding in the gables, was as authentically regional as that of Shaw’s nearby houses, but the vaguely eighteenth-century vernacular of the detailing was much simpler than Shaw’s repertory of moulded and cut brickwork at Lowther Lodge.

Nesfield, in designing what is now Barclays Bank in the Market Square of Saffron Walden in Essex, remained more eclectic, staying closer to the manorial mode of Cloverley Hall yet using again various Japanese motifs in the rich decoration. This was built in 1874. Godwin, who had just moved to London with the actress Ellen Terry and was now largely occupied with designing stage sets, developed further in the rooms of their rented house in Taviton Street in 1873-4 the Anglo-Japanese mode of his interiors of ten years earlier in Bristol. In 1874 he also arranged an exhibition of paintings in a similar spirit for his friend the painter Whistler at the new Grosvenor Galleries.[268]

In the mid seventies, however, it was Shaw, not Nesfield or Godwin, who occupied the centre of the architectural stage. In the Convent of the Sisters of Bethany of 1874 in St Clements Road at Boscombe near Bournemouth he disguised his use of concrete, then a relatively new building material, with his familiar Sussex vernacular. He did the same in a slightly later series of designs for cottages made of patented prefabricated concrete slabs.[269] It is worth noting, moreover, that the internal iron skeleton above the bold cantilever on the front of his Old Swan House (Plate 103) of 1876 at 17 Chelsea Embankment in London provides in effect an example of what would later be called ‘skyscraper construction’, since it carries completely the weight of the brickwork of the upper walls; this was a decade before the ‘invention’ of this sort of construction in Chicago (see Chapter 14). Shaw’s interest in technical developments and his enthusiasm for new materials and methods was evidently very great, always provided that he could bend them to his particular sort of retroactive pictorial vision. When he built the Jury House for the Paris Exhibition of 1878 of patent cement bricks, for example, he designed the façade very elegantly in his Late Stuart manner just as if it were of cut and moulded clay bricks. Godwin and Whistler, however, were showing at this same exhibition an Anglo-Japanese room of highly original character in association with Watt the furniture manufacturer.

Shaw’s excellent church of this period at Bournemouth, St Michael’s and All Angels, Poole Hill, begun in 1873, is Late Victorian in the crispness and clarity of its design but less archaeological than those of this date by Bodley. It seems to indicate that he could have made a great reputation as a church builder had he not been absorbed with secular work. But by the seventies secular work once again provided the field of major prestige in England, as it had hardly done since 1840, and so Shaw concentrated on it. Having revolutionized country-house design, he now turned, more definitely than at Lowther Lodge—by its size and open siting more a country house set in the city—to urban and suburban domestic work. In these his conquest was even more complete, at least in England and, as regards the suburbs, in America.

The Old Swan House and its neighbour Cheyne House at the outer end of the Chelsea Embankment, respectively of 1876 and 1875, are both mansions rather than ordinary terrace houses. They also represent a considerably further advance along the road towards a formal eighteenth-century revival than Lowther Lodge. Old Swan House is completely symmetrical, and the upper storeys are also quite regularly fenestrated in the early eighteenth-century way (Plate 103). However, the total effect is still highly Picturesque because of the way these upper storeys are cantilevered forward; from the cantilever depend, moreover, elaborate oriels of much earlier character very similar to those Shaw had introduced at New Zealand Chambers. Such oriels he long continued to employ; they are not only a principal feature of his own house in Hampstead, built in this same year, but also of the much later Holl and Long houses. Cheyne House occupies an irregular curving plot with the entrance in Royal Hospital Road; but Shaw used all his considerable ingenuity to give it symmetrical façades, even though the plan actually has little of the orderliness of that of Lowther Lodge.

If these two Chelsea houses seem to presage an early return to the serenity of Georgian street architecture, Shaw’s J. P. Heseltine house of 1875 at 196 Queen’s Gate in South Kensington unleashed a flood of the most individualistic house-design London had ever seen. Stucco-fronted houses of builders’ Renaissance design were still being erected on contiguous sites when this tall gabled façade rose, totally oblivious of old and new neighbours. Cut brick, moulded brick, terracotta, all of the brightest red, surround very large mullioned windows in a composition that is gratuitously asymmetrical at the base but symmetrical in the upper storeys below the crowning gable. For fifteen years such houses proliferated in the Chelsea, Kensington, and Earls Court districts of western London. The best are by Shaw himself, such as those at 68, 62, and 72 Cadogan Square—the first of 1879, the others of 1882—and those at 8-11 and 15 Chelsea Embankment of 1878-9; but more are by other architects, and the vast majority by builders. In the Chelsea Embankment range River House at No. 3 is by Bodley; Nos 4-6 are by Godwin; and No. 7 is by R. Phéné Spiers (1838-1916), an architect whose Parisian training did not restrain him from following Shaw.

Collingham Gardens of 1881-7 by Sir Ernest George (1839-1922) and his then partner Harold A. Peto (?-1890), a sort of square with variously designed houses, all gabled, opening on to a lawn in the centre, provides a still more complete illustration of what may be called Neo-Picturesque urbanism. Not at all Shavian, the detailing of many of these houses is very similar to that of Cuijpers’s Rijksmuseum and none of it Queen Anne. The contiguous mansions that George & Peto built in 1882 near by in Harrington Gardens, one for W. S. Gilbert at No. 19 (Plate 104B), the other for Sir Ernest Cassel, the banker, are the most elaborate single London examples of their domestic work. The house of the composer of the Savoy Operas approaches very closely the German Meistersinger mode of the period, but the touch is much lighter—intentionally whimsical perhaps?—and both the organization of the whole and the execution of the profuse detail is very superior to what one finds in most contemporary German work (see Chapter 9).

Stevenson’s best and most Shavian houses in London are two that he built in 1878 in partnership with A. J. Adams in Lowther Gardens behind Lowther Lodge; however, those he built at 40-42 Pont Street have a certain interest because the mode that he exploited here is often called ‘Pont Street Dutch’, so ubiquitous is it in this part of Chelsea. This name also emphasizes the characteristic tendency of the late seventies and eighties towards varying the English late seventeenth-century vernacular mode by the introduction of Dutch and Flemish elements of detail, usually executed in terracotta, as George & Peto did in most of the Earls Court houses mentioned above. Thus, by the late seventies, the long-established London tradition of coherent terrace design came to an end. That was, on the whole, a real urbanistic misfortune, however excellent some of the best individual houses by the above-mentioned architects may be.

Shaw’s venture into the suburbs initiated a new domestic tradition of positive value and also a tradition of ‘planning’ that has continued with some modification down to the present, both in England and abroad. At Bedford Park, Turnham Green, then well beyond the western edges of built-up London, Shaw laid out in 1876 and largely designed an early ‘Garden Suburb’ (see Chapter 24), in fact, almost a ‘new town’, similar in some ways to the New Towns of the present post-war period, but without any industries of its own. Small houses, mostly semi-detached, i.e., in pairs, stand in their own gardens, simply and casually built of good red brick with a certain amount of modest Queen Anne detailing. The scheme is very complete, including a church by Shaw that is most ingeniously styled to harmonize with the domesticity of the houses, a club, a tavern, shops, and so forth.[270] Godwin’s assistant Maurice B. Adams (1849-1933) and E. J. May (1853-1941) also worked here, as well as Godwin himself; indeed, some of the best houses are not by Shaw but by Godwin.

With characteristic versatility, while the construction of Bedford Park was proceeding in this simplified version of his middle manner, Picturesque but distinctly anti-Gothic, Shaw was also erecting at Adcote in Shropshire in 1877 a large Tudor manor house in reddish stone. This is notable for its restrained, almost ‘abstract’, detailing and for the tall mullioned window-wall of the hall bay, more than rivalling that of Cloverley Hall. Flete, a still larger house in Devon begun the year after Adcote, is also Tudor. Dawpool in Cheshire, demolished in 1926, was begun in 1882 in much the same mode but was even more extensive and elaborate than Flete. J. F. Doyle (1840-1913) of Liverpool collaborated on this.

The Bedford Park church of 1878, St Michael’s, is more or less Queen Anne, at least not at all Gothic. But at Ilkley in Yorkshire Shaw’s St Margaret’s of the previous year is a remarkably personal essay in the Perpendicular, low and broad and elegantly detailed. In quality this is well above his earlier Bournemouth church and rather more original in its proportions than the standard work of Bodley and his imitators at this time. Somewhat similar, and still more original, is St Swithin’s in Gervis Road in Bournemouth, also of 1877; while All Saints’, Leek, of 1886 carries almost to the point of parody the Shavian stylization of English Late Gothic proportion towards the broad and low—visually, that is; ritualistically they are quite as ‘High’ as Bodley’s.

Next Shaw produced his finest and most creatively conceived church, Holy Trinity, Latimer Road, comparable in quality to his early church at Bingley but wholly different in character. This was built in 1887-9 for the Harrow Mission in a poor district of western London. The interior of Holy Trinity is a single vessel, very broad and moderately low, covered by a flat-pointed wooden ceiling which is tied by vigorous horizontal members of iron cased in wood and heavily buttressed externally (Plate 106A). Behind the chancel, which is no more than a square dais on which the altar is raised, rises an ecclesiastical version of the Shavian window-wall, broad and low like the space it terminates but arched and lightly traceried at the top. The result could hardly be more different from Shaw’s domestic Queen Anne of these years. It is on such things as this church, in which his basic architectural capacities are revealed unconfused by frivolous elaboration of detail, that his claim to high talent, occasionally to genius, must be based.

If Shaw did not cease to design churches while continually extending the range of his secular practice, it is a still more notable testimony to the breadth of his approach that he built in 1879, in Kensington Gore between the Albert Hall and Lowther Lodge—and with a characteristic disregard for both—the first really handsome block of flats erected in London; the first, that is, unless one prefers the Second Empire ones of the late sixties in Grosvenor Gardens. The tall and extensive mass of this block, like that of most of his houses of the period, is extremely picturesque in silhouette because of the very tall and ornate gables that face the Park. But these are quite regularly spaced and the walls below them, with the multitudinous segment-arched, white-sashed windows all evenly phrased in threes, illustrate Shaw’s Queen Anne of the seventies at its most disciplined (Plate 104A).[271]

As has been noted, Shaw was by now the preferred architect of most of his fellow Royal Academicians. Webb had built houses for several of the Pre-Raphaelite painters who were his friends and associates. Less successful and more advanced painters employed Godwin. Small though it is and now much remodelled, the White House in Tite Street round the corner from the Chelsea Embankment, which Godwin built for his friend Whistler in 1878-9, has one of the most original façades of the decade. As its name implies, although all of brick, it was not ‘red’ like Morris’s and Stevenson’s famous houses, but ‘white’ because the walls were so painted,[272] recalling perhaps the white-painted Colonial farmhouses of Whistler’s New England youth. The sparse detail is related in its vaguely eighteenth-century character to the Shavian Queen Anne, but it is much more delicate and linear, indeed almost Late Georgian in inspiration. Most significantly, the composition of the façade as a whole, and even more evidently the asymmetrical placing of the door and windows, owes a great deal to those abstract principles of Japanese art which both Whistler and Godwin had been studying for almost twenty years.

Whistler had to sell his house almost as soon as it was finished in order to pay the costs of his unhappy libel suit against Ruskin, a legal battle in which the Late Victorian and the High Victorian came to violent grips. But Godwin went on to build several more studio houses in Tite Street at Nos 29, 33, and 44 in the next few years and also the Tower House in 1885. Similar, but inferior, is No. 31 by R. W. Edis, which John Singer Sargent later occupied. Also in Tite Street is the commonplace terrace house at No. 16, of which the interiors were decorated by Godwin for Oscar Wilde,[273] the greatest aesthete of them all. Wilde’s influential ideas in this field, carried to America on a lecture tour in 1881-2, were largely derived from Godwin, it may be noted.

When Shaw turned again to commercial work it was to design in 1881 the offices for the bankers Baring Brothers at 8 Bishopsgate in the City of London. This small building was as discreet, as orderly, and almost as domestic as Cheyne House. But the next year, so chameleon-like was his development, he gave the more conspicuous Alliance Assurance Building at the corner of St James’s Street and Pall Mall opposite St James’s Palace broad, low, banded arches of brick and stone below and elaborated the vertical articulation of the upper storeys with profuse sculptural ornament.[274] Very tall and scallopy gables provide a Neo-Picturesque effect only too comparable to the most vulgar ‘Pont Street Dutch’ houses designed by his rivals or even to contemporary Northern Renaissance work on the Continent. To emphasize his variousness further, there is diagonally across the street a later edifice for the same clients, built in collaboration with his pupil Ernest Newton (1856-1922) in 1903, so quietly academic in the Neo-Georgian taste of the early twentieth century that one can hardly believe it is also Shaw’s.

His next important secular works after the first Alliance building, both begun in 1887 like the Latimer Road church, contrast with each other almost as markedly as they do with that. Characteristic of the essentially private patronage—patronage from successful artists, patronage from business, patronage from the professional classes—responsible for the best English architecture of this period is the fact that Shaw’s first public commission came only at this advanced stage of his career. London’s Metropolitan Police Offices in New Scotland Yard, of which the original block was built in 1887-8 and the second block to the south added in 1890, have a splendid site on the Thames Embankment. Remembering, it would seem almost for the first time, his own Scottish birth—or possibly in apposite reference to the familiar name of the London police headquarters—Shaw designed Scotland Yard somewhat like a Scottish castle with corner tourelles and tall curved gables, but using throughout heavy and rather academic later seventeenth-century detailing of a much less regional sort (Plate 106B). Red brick and stone in combination make it also as colouristic as the Alliance building, the solidity of the proportions makes it weighty, and the high gables and tower roofs give it great variety of outline. As a result, the total effect is almost High Victorian in its vigour and its massiveness. Shaw is said to have regretted the need to build a second block; certainly it must have been more impressive when the original block stood alone like an isolated riverside fortress.

Scotland Yard seems to look backward somewhat, at least in relation to that gradual development towards orderliness and restraint of an eighteenth-century sort which can be discerned in Shaw’s work of the seventies despite all its variousness. On the other hand, the house that he built in 1887-8 for Fred White,[275] an American diplomat, at 170 Queen’s Gate, so near to that strikingly aberrant terrace house of the previous decade at No. 196, seems to look forward into the early twentieth century, when the eighteenth-century Georgian would provide the basis for a quite archaeological revival. This plain rectangular block of red brick, orderly and symmetrical on the long façade towards Imperial Institute Road and also on the end towards Queen’s Gate, with three ranges of large sash-windows below an academic cornice, is therefore as much a historical landmark, if not an original creation, as was Glen Andred twenty years before (Plate #105:pl105). The suave and well-scaled ornamentation is concentrated at the doorway in the eighteenth-century manner, and the hip roof is unbroken except by regularly spaced dormers. Yet, curiously enough, the plan is somewhat less completely regular and symmetrical than one might expect from the exterior; for example, the large drawing-room towards Queen’s Gate is L-shaped.

Only the excellence of the craftsmanship here, based not on the Sussex vernacular but on the most sophisticated work of around 1720, the prominence of the tall chimneys, and the wide central dormer with its curved top reveal Shaw’s hand and suggest, perhaps, an early date; otherwise such a house might well have been built forty years or so later by many other architects, English and American (see Chapter 24). However, Webb at Smeaton Manor[276] in Yorkshire, built in 1877-9, had already arrived at an almost identical regularity and formality of design (Plate 102A). Characteristically, however, he did not elaborate the exterior with borrowed eighteenth-century detailing, and the house remains almost undatable on internal evidence, like much of his best work.

Scotland Yard is an all but unique example of an English public building of distinction erected in the eighties. Before continuing with the account of Shaw’s work in the nineties, two prominent features of the London skyline, the most striking additions made since Butterfield’s spire of All Saints’ rose in Margaret Street in the fifties and the Victoria Tower of the Houses of Parliament was completed in the sixties, should be mentioned. Both the Imperial Institute, towering over Shaw’s contiguous Fred White house in South Kensington, which was built in 1887-93 in honour of Queen Victoria’s first jubilee, and the Catholic cathedral of Westminster, not begun until 1894, are especially notable for their very tall dome-topped towers. The cathedral, which was designed by J. F. Bentley (1839-1902), a pupil of Clutton, has also a magnificent domed interior. The Institute, built by T. E. Collcutt (1840-1924), was perhaps of less over-all interest but extremely refined and elegant in its detailing compared to the contemporary work of George & Peto, which it most closely resembles. Curiously enough, the very underscaled membering and even so dainty a trick as the use of single courses of red brick here and there in the stonework does not make the 280-foot tower petty. It may be compared to its own very great advantage with Haller’s contemporary tower, in a somewhat parallel Northern Renaissance vein, on the Hamburg Rathaus. Collcutt’s own earlier tower on the Town Hall at Wakefield in Yorkshire of 1877-80 was less successful than this London landmark, which has happily survived the rest of the building.

Bentley’s tower has a similar silhouette, but is more boldly striated by broad bands of brick and stone. The detail, partly Byzantine, partly Early Renaissance despite his distinguished early career as a Late Victorian Gothic church architect, is, like Collcutt’s, rather underscaled. This goes still further to prove the extent to which this period in England saw all architecture, even that of cathedrals, in domestic terms. However, well before Bentley began his cathedral—it is not even yet completed as regards the internal decoration—Shaw had turned towards considerably more monumental forms at Scotland Yard, and even to quite academic design.

At Bryanston, a large country house in Dorset begun in 1889 for Lord Portman, Shaw modelled the main block on Sir Roger Pratt’s Coleshill House of the mid seventeenth century; the side wings here are quite Gibbsian. This is the earliest example of what the English call ‘Monumental Queen Anne’—to distinguish this sort of work henceforth from the freer and more vernacular Queen Anne of the seventies and eighties—and the Americans ‘Georgian Revival’. Two years later Shaw built Chesters in Northumberland. This mansion is equally academic, if less derivative from particular sources; but it is also highly original in plan and conception. The composition of the incurved façade planes, moreover, is as knowing and as ingenious in its formal way as anything he ever built in a more rambling vein.

Later in the nineties Shaw’s stylistic uncertainty—or, if one wishes to call it so, his versatility—was notably illustrated in two large commercial buildings built in Liverpool. The façade of Parr’s Bank in Castle Street, built in 1898 in collaboration with W. E. Willink (1856-1924) and P. C. Thicknesse (1860-1920), is of the suavest academic order. Its proportions are surer than in any of his other works except Chesters, and yet he striated its light-coloured stonework with bands of green marble in a way few later architects working in this vein would ever have thought of doing. Two years later, in the offices that he built in collaboration with Doyle for Ismay, Imrie & Co., later the White Star Line—for whom he also designed the interiors of the liner Oceanic—he provided what was externally almost a copy of Scotland Yard, and yet inside he exposed the riveted metal structural members in a fashion at once frank and highly decorative.

If Shaw had had the opportunity to rebuild Nash’s Regent Street Quadrant completely according to the designs that he prepared in 1905 the loss of the original work might not be so serious. Approaching seventy-five, he turned here to a Piranesian Classicism. The colonnaded section finished in 1908, which forms the northern front of the Piccadilly Hotel, though flanked at both ends by an emasculated version of Shaw’s design carried out in 1923 by his disciple and biographer Sir Reginald Blomfield (1856-1942), rivals in boldness anything English architecture had produced since the days of Vanbrugh and Hawksmore. Even more spectacular, and also incomplete, since the gable at the east end was never built, is the Piccadilly façade of the hotel with its tremendous open colonnade raised high against the sky (Plate 107). The Classical serenity of this feature is characteristically contrasted with the voluted silhouette of the tall gable over the projecting wing at the west end, and the exuberance of the whole puts most other Edwardian Neo-Baroque to shame.

To summarize Shaw’s achievement or even to epitomize his personal style is almost impossible. He was, for example, in no ordinary sense of the word merely an eclectic; yet his modes were very various, more various than those of almost any other nineteenth-century architect of equal rank. After his first borrowings from Nesfield, however, they were all his own—his own, at least, until hordes of other architects in England and America took them up, one or two at a time, often vulgarizing them beyond recognition. He was probably not the most talented English architect of his generation and certainly not the most original. How much he owed to Nesfield at the start it is impossible to estimate, even though at least two of the characteristic Shavian modes seem to have been originally of his invention—if not, indeed, of Devey’s!

Yet ironically Nesfield’s own later work appeared to contemporaries almost like an echo of Shaw’s if it was known at all. He never had any such success as did Shaw, and died relatively young in 1888. Godwin also was somehow never able, after 1870, to repeat the public triumphs that had been his in the competitions of the early sixties. In his later life he turned more and more to designing sets and costumes for the theatre and died in 1886, two years before Nesfield. Webb lived on till 1915, although he retired from practice in 1900; his spirit, moreover, lived on in a quite different way from Shaw’s. It was through emulation of the craftsman-like integrity of Webb’s work that the attitudes, rather than the forms, of Pugin’s earlier Gothic Revival were transmitted to the first modern architects quite as much as through study of the writings of his friend and close associate Morris.

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