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