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
Shaw’s first client had been a painter, J. C. Horsley, R.A., for whom he
made some alterations in the early sixties and whose son later entered
his office. Glen Andred was for another painter, E. W. Cooke, later
R.A., and West House was for George Boughton, R.A. Kate Greenaway,
better known today than these forgotten academicians, was an illustrator
of children’s books much patronized by Ruskin. F. W. Goodall, R.A.
(1870), Marcus Stone, R.A. (1876), Luke Fildes, R.A. (1877), Edwin Long,
R.A. (1878, and again in 1888), Frank Holl, R.A. (1881), are other
successful painters and fellow academicians—Shaw became an A.R.A.
himself in 1872 and an R.A. in 1877—for whom he built houses (with the
dates of the commissions). All but Goodall’s house at Harrow Weald were
either in Melbury Road in Kensington in London or else in Fitzjohn’s
Avenue near his own Hampstead house of 1875 at 6 Ellerdale Road. Where
the prosperous artists, themselves presumably aping the aristocracy,
led, magnates and City men were now quick to follow. The Newcastle
steelmaster Sir William Armstrong had Shaw build Cragside near Rothbury
in Northumberland for him as early as 1870.
Leyswood, near Withyham in Sussex, begun in 1868 at the same time as the
Cookridge Hospital, was one of Shaw’s most influential works (Plate
123). More archaeologically manorial than Glen Andred, it provided a
mass of suggestions that English and American architects borrowed again
and again over the next twenty years and more. Because of Shaw’s later
leadership, it is natural for posterity to note what was new here;
contemporaries, used to the wild vagaries of the High Victorian Gothic,
saw Leyswood rather as a reaction against the ‘modernism’ of the fifties
and earlier sixties. Tile-hung upper storeys and barge-boarded gables,
richly half-timbered—the half-timbering a mere sham applied over solid
brickwork!—long banks of casements that approach the twentieth-century
‘ribbon-window’ and great mullioned bays providing ‘window-walls’ as
extensive as Nesfield’s at Cloverley clothed an interior that was not at
all medieval but a more developed example than Glen Andred of the
‘agglutinative plan’ (Figure 19). The main reception rooms were grouped
about a central hall, from one side of which rose elaborate stairs
arranged in several flights about an open well. Webb had already essayed
this sort of planning in a more orderly way at Arisaig begun in 1863
(Figure 23); but it was Shaw’s version, not Webb’s, that was generally
imitated (see Chapter 15).
[Illustration:
Figure 19. Norman Shaw: Leyswood, Sussex, 1868, plan
]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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