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.