In England the Picturesque and the Gothic Revival were effective solvents of Romantic Classicism, because both, and particularly the latter, were consciously nationalistic, emphasizing in an increasingly nationalistic period the recovery of local rather than of universal building traditions. For a good part of their local acceptability they were dependent, moreover, on certain warm connotations which their visual forms had for English patrons. The Rustic Cottage, the Tudor Parsonage, the Castellated Mansion had all, supposedly, been autochthonous products of the insular past. On the other hand, even though the English of the eighteenth century had adopted as their own such foreign painters as Claude and Poussin, from whose canvases the Italian Villa mode principally derived both its forms and its prestige, that mode was certainly not English in its ultimate prototypes. It is readily understandable, therefore, that it was the Italian Villa, of all the established vehicles of the Picturesque, which had the greatest success in a Germany romantically mad about Italy. But such superb compositions as the Court Gardener’s House by Schinkel (Plate 14A) or Persius’s Friedenskirche at Potsdam (Plate 15), perhaps the highest international achievements in the Picturesque genre, owed only their basic concept, if even that, to England. Their elements were for the most part borrowed directly from Italian sources, and they were carefully composed according to a formal discipline not inconsonant with the standards of Romantic Classicism. The Swiss Chalet, an even more alien mode in England than the Italian Villa, was a native one in Central Europe. Hence one finds Schinkel first, and then his pupils, exploiting it with considerable virtuosity as the _Tirolerhäuschen_. Indeed, the particular form of wooden fretwork which came to be called ‘gingerbread’ in English, one of the favourite forms of later Picturesque detail everywhere in the western world from Russia to America, is more likely to be derived from Alpine chalets via nineteenth-century German than via nineteenth-century English intermediaries.