The virtuoso of the Picturesque mode and, after Soane, the greatest architectural figure of these years in England, was John Nash (1752-1835). Working in partnership with Repton for several years at the turn of the century, he turned out a spate of Picturesque houses, many of them rather small, with various sorts of medieval detail: Killy Moon in Ireland, built in 1803, is Norman; more usually they are Tudor or at least Tudoresque: his own East Cowes Castle on the Isle of Wight, which was begun in 1798, for example, or Luscombe in Devonshire, begun the following year. The medieval detail was probably designed by the French émigré Augustus (Auguste) Charles Pugin (1762-1832), whom Nash employed at this time (see Chapter 6). It is rather for their asymmetrical silhouettes and for the free plans that this asymmetry encouraged, however, than for the stylistic plausibility of their detailing that these houses are notable. Finer than such ‘castles’ is Cronkhill, which Nash built in 1802 at Atcham, Salop. Here the varied forms are all more or less Italianate, and the whole was evidently inspired by the fabricks in the paintings of Claude and the Poussins—literally an example of ‘picturesque’ architecture. Actually more characteristic of the Picturesque at this time, however, is the Hamlet at Blaise Castle. There Nash repeated in 1811 a variety of cottage types that he had already used individually elsewhere, arranging them in an irregular cluster (Plate 50A). The Rustic Cottage mode, like so many aspects of the Picturesque in architecture, had its origins in the fabricks designed to ornament eighteenth-century gardens. But the mode had by now attained considerable prestige thanks to the writings of the chief theorists of the Picturesque,[19] Richard Payne Knight (1750-1824) and Uvedale Price (1747-1829). Their support was responsible also for the rising prestige of the asymmetrical Castellated Mansion and the Italian Villa; indeed, Payne Knight’s own Downton Castle in Shropshire of 1774-8 is both Castellated and Italianate. The appearance of several prettily illustrated books on cottages[20] in the nineties provided a variety of models for emulation, and from the beginning of the new century the Cottage mode was well established for gate lodges, dairies, and all sorts of other minor constructions in the country.