Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuriesHitchcock, Henry-Russell
History
Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell
Architecture, Modern -- 19th century; Architecture, Modern -- 20th century
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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