CHAPTER 12 - Notes
[261]. Many serious and conscientious English students of this period would precede such a list with the name of George Devey (1820-86). Of Devey, in whose office C. F. A. Voysey, the most original English architect of the next generation, chose to work after completing his apprenticeship with Seddon, Voysey later wrote: ‘Providentially an invitation came to enter the Office of the most extensive practitioner in homes for the Nobility and Gentry. No domestic practice has equalled his in extent before or since his death.’ As in the case of William Burn, whose aristocratic practice of the forties and fifties Devey’s more than rivalled in the sixties and seventies, neither he nor his clients cared for publicity, and so none of his work was published, even to the slight extent that the work of Nesfield and Webb was illustrated in the professional journals. Still today his houses are known to posterity chiefly through a few articles: Godfrey, Walter ‘The Work of George Devey’, Architectural Review, XXI (1907), 23-30, 83-8, 293-306; and ‘George Devey, F.R.I.B.A., a Biographical Essay’, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, XIII (1906), 501-25.
But just as the work of Nesfield and Webb was in actuality familiar from the first to their professional friends and rivals, as also to prospective country house clients, so was that of Devey. Many of the stylistic trends so vigorously exploited by Shaw in the seventies can be traced back to Devey’s houses of the preceding decade—or so such experts on the period as H. S. Goodhart-Rendel and John Brandon-Jones, who know Devey’s work intimately, always insist. Foreign students of this period, from Muthesius to the Editor of this series and this author, perhaps merely because of lack of direct or even adequate indirect knowledge of Devey’s houses, have never been ready to grant him so important a place in the story. Here particularly, where the story is told in an international context, the evident strength of the influence of Shaw’s work abroad even more than at home justifies giving his primacy and referring only incidentally to that of Devey.
[262]. Shaw did not immediately succeed Webb, since the latter stayed on in Street’s office until the middle of 1859. There must have been close contact between them over a period of up to a year, and they remained in touch from then on. Blomfield, Shaw’s biographer, being himself prejudiced against Webb, underestimates the reality and the importance of this relationship. It is only one of the many errors of fact or emphasis in his book.
To quote from a private communication from Brandon-Jones concerning Shaw and Webb: ‘Each must have had a good idea of the work the other was doing. Their two offices, in Gray’s Inn and Bloomsbury Square, were within a stone’s-throw of one another, and Lethaby while working for Shaw was in close touch with Webb and was in his spare time assisting him with the architectural work of Morris & Co. It is quite obvious from the dates of various executed works that Lethaby was carrying over Webb’s ideas and details and trying them out in work he was doing for Shaw. As for the mutual respect and friendship between Webb and Shaw, I [Brandon-Jones] have recently come across a letter written at the time of Shaw’s death in which he [Webb] pays a tribute to his “old friend”, and I have also seen a letter from Sydney Barnsley to Sydney Cockerell in which Barnsley says that he had called on Shaw only a few months before his death and that Shaw had been talking of Webb and saying that he still treasured some photographs given him by Webb nearly fifty years earlier.’
[263]. Devey’s incidental work at Penshurst Place in Kent, where that notable fourteenth-century manor house was restored by him, having been done more than a decade earlier, probably prepared the way for this. It is extremely likely that Nesfield was familiar with what Devey had done there; but the line forward leads, in the late sixties, from Nesfield to Shaw, not directly from Devey to Shaw.
[264]. See Pevsner, N., ‘Art Furniture of the Seventies’, Architectural Review, CXI (1952), 23-50.
[265]. The most famous instance of japonisme in decoration is Whistler’s ‘Peacock Room’, now in the Freer Gallery in Washington. See Ferriday, P., ‘Peacock Room’, Architectural Review, CXXV (1959), 407-14.
[266]. Once again Devey had prepared the way, in this case at Betteshanger, Kent, a house built precisely ten years earlier. This will doubtless have been known both to friends of Devey’s clients and to various young architects. But the Kew lodge was located where everyone could see it, even though it was not published until the nineties.
[267]. For this also there was precedent at Devey’s Betteshanger; but Betteshanger initiated no popular mode in the way that the conspicuous London schools by Robson and Stevenson’s highly touted house did at this point. For the schools, see Jones, D. G., ‘Towers of Learning’, Architectural Review, CXXIII (1958), 393-8.
[268]. See Harbron, D., ‘Queen Anne Taste and Aestheticism’, Architectural Review, XCLV (1943), 15-18.
[269]. See Shaw, R. N., Sketches for Cottages and Other Buildings ..., London, 1878.
[270]. See ‘The Ballad of Bedford Park’, St James’s Gazette, 17 December 1881 (reprinted by Blomfield, Shaw, 34-6). This is an amusing but not entirely accurate contemporary description in verse.
[271]. The handling of this building in section is particularly ingenious, the area of the service portions at the rear of the flats being much increased by the use of lower storey heights than in the reception rooms at the front. This device has been revived since, but its earlier invention by Shaw has rarely been noted Brandon-Jones pointed out to me.
[272]. At least they are now so painted; it is probable they were originally of ‘white’ Suffolk brick, actually a very pale yellow when newly laid and unbegrimed, but more likely to be black after a few decades of exposure to the air of London!
[273]. Hyde, H. M., ‘Wilde and his Architect’, Architectural Review, CIX (1951), 175-6.
[274]. It is characteristic of Shaw’s prestige in America and the rapidity with which architectural ideas crossed the ocean at this time that Shaw’s handsome perspective of the Alliance was published in America a few months earlier than in England.
[275]. White first approached Webb but, finding him too difficult to deal with, went to Shaw—a significant episode as regards both architects.
[276]. See Brandon-Jones, J., ‘Notes on the Building of Smeaton Manor’, Architectural History, I (1958), 31-59.