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
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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