George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers — John Shaqi
George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted PapersStreet, George Edmund
History
George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers
Street, George Edmund
Architecture, Gothic; Church architecture -- Europe; Europe -- Description and travel; Street, George Edmund, 1824-1881
antiphonal prayer, his spirit was forged and tempered.
At school he had sketched and scrawled, and when after his father’s
death in 1840 he was recalled to live with his mother and sister at
Exeter, he studied painting for a while as painting was taught in
the provinces, learning the management of oils and the science of
perspective. No harm could come from this except that in landscape
sketching later he was shy of strong colour, and set down Spain and
Italy more pallid than he liked; but already the current of his life
was running by church walls. In the year before, his brother, who was
eight years his senior and was brim-full of mediaevalism, had taken him
on a short walking trip for what they called ecclesiologizing. For a
while he lived near Exeter cathedral, drawn to it at that time by every
sentiment: grief for his father--since his domestic affections were
stable--and anxiety for the future, strong religious feeling, aesthetic
feeling as strong, the beauty of the service and the beauty of the
building. Thence he made another trip with this same brother, Thomas,
around about through the West of England to Barnstaple, Bideford,
Torrington and Clovelly. The diary of that tour, written shortly
after his sixteenth birthday, is simply the first of the always happy
notebooks which record his many journeys in the interest of landscape
and art. It sets down the lay of the land and the aspect of the streets
where they passed; it notes that he got up at six to sketch out of
his bedroom window; and it preserves more fact than comment, and less
of the trivial than of the significant. Within another year he was
articled to an architect in Winchester, studying the cathedral from
every point and at every hour. The two brothers tramped the country
for twenty miles about, and as they could pushed further, for the most
part on foot still. In the spring of 1843 they walked to Chichester; in
the autumn into Lincolnshire; the next year into Sussex. In 1845 they
reached Northampton, returning thither in 1846 and again in 1850. The
same autumn he went to the Lake Country and thence across to Durham and
home by the Yorkshire dales and abbeys. Jervaulx, however, he missed at
this time, nor does it appear among the sketches of other abbeys in a
notebook of 1875. In the spring of 1847 the two brothers were among the
churches of the fen-land in Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. Meanwhile in
1844 Thomas, who was the eldest of the brothers, and had succeeded to
his father’s practice, took a house near London and fetched his mother
and sister to live with him there.
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