CHAPTER 1
ROMANTIC CLASSICISM AROUND 1800
Despite the drastically reduced production of the years just before and after 1800, between the outbreak of the French Revolution and the termination of Napoleon’s imperial career, there are prominent buildings in many countries that provide fine examples of Romantic Classicism in its early maturity; others, generally more modest in size, give evidence of the vitality of the Picturesque at this time. Since England and America were least directly affected by the French Revolution, however much they were drawn into the wars that were its aftermath, they produced more than their share, so to say, of executed work. French architects before 1806 were mostly reduced to designing monuments destined never to be built or to adapting old structures to new uses.
The greatest architect in active practice in the 1790s was Sir John Soane (1753-1837), from 1788 Architect of the Bank of England. The career of his master, the younger Dance, was in decline; he had made what were perhaps his greatest contributions a good quarter of a century earlier. Whatever Soane owed to Dance, and he evidently owed him a great deal, the Bank[[17]] offered greater opportunities than the older man had ever had. His interiors of the early nineties at the Bank leave the world of academic Classicism completely behind (Plate [3]). His extant Lothbury façade of 1795, with the contiguous ‘Tivoli Corner’ of a decade later—now modified almost beyond recognition—and even more the demolished Waiting Room Court (Plate [4A]) showed that his innovations in this period were by no means restricted to interiors.
Soane’s style, consonant though it was in many ways with the general ideals of Romantic Classicism, is a highly personal one. At the Bank, however, he was not creating de novo but committed to the piecemeal reconstruction of an existing complex of buildings, and controlled as well by very stringent technical requirements. Thus the grouping of the offices about the Rotunda, like the plan of the Rotunda itself, goes back to the work done by his predecessor Sir Robert Taylor (1714-88) twenty years earlier; while the special need of the Bank for various kinds of security made necessary both the avoidance of openings on the exterior and a fireproof structural system within. The architectural expression that Soane gave to his complex spaces in the offices which he designed in 1791 and built in 1792-4 had very much the same abstract qualities as those to which older masters of Romantic Classicism, such as Ledoux and Dance, had already aspired in the preceding decades (Plate [3]). The novel treatment of the smooth plaster surfaces of the light vaults made of hollow terracotta pots, where he substituted linear striations for the conventional membering of Classical design, was as notable as the frank revelation of the delicate cast-iron framework of his glazed lanterns (see Chapter [7]). These interiors have particularly appealed to twentieth-century taste, while Soane’s columnar confections of this period generally appear somewhat pompous and banal.
The Rotunda of 1794-5 was grander and more Piranesian in effect; thus it shared in the international tendency of this period towards megalomania. So also the contemporary Lothbury façade, with its rare accents of crisply profiled antae and its vast unbroken expanses of flat rustication, is less personal to Soane and more in a mode that was common to many Romantic Classical architects all over the Western world. The original Tivoli Corner of 1805, however, was almost Baroque in its plasticity, with a Roman not a Greek order, and a most remarkable piling up of flat elements organized in three dimensions at the skyline that could only be Soane’s.
On the other hand, the reduction of relief and the linear stylization of the constituent elements of the Loggia in the Waiting Room Court of 1804, equally personal to Soane, illustrated an anti-Baroque tendency to reduce to a minimum the sculptural aspect of architecture (Plate [4A]). Planes were emphasized rather than masses, and the character of the detail was thoroughly renewed as well as the basic formulas of Classical design that Soane had inherited. This was even more apparent in the New Bank Buildings, a terrace of houses, begun in 1807, that once stood across Prince’s Street. Except for the paired Ionic columns at the ends, conventional Classical forms were avoided almost as completely as in the Bank offices of the previous decade, and the smooth plane of the stucco wall was broken only by incised linear detail.
Perhaps the most masterly example of this characteristically Soanic treatment is still to be seen in the gateway and lodge of the country house that he built at Tyringham in Buckinghamshire in 1792-7 (Plate [6A]). There the simple mass is defined by flat surfaces bounded by plain incised lines. The house itself is both less drastically novel and less successful; various other Soane houses of these decades have more character.
Summerson has claimed that Soane introduced all his important innovations before 1800. However that may be, there is no major break in his work at the end of the first decade of the century, nor did his production then notably increase. It is therefore rather arbitrary to cut off an account of his architecture at this point; but it is necessary to do so if the importance of the Picturesque countercurrent in these same years, not as yet of great consequence as an aspect of Soane’s major works, is to be adequately emphasized. His concern with varied lighting effects, however, if not necessarily Picturesque technically, gave evidence of an intense Romanticism; more indubitably Picturesque was his exaggerated interest in broken skylines.
While Soane’s work at the Bank was proceeding, in these years before and after 1800, James Wyatt (1746-1813), capable of producing at Dodington House in 1798-1808 a quite conventional example of Romantic Classicism, was building in the years between 1796 and his death in 1813 for that great Romantic William Beckford the largest of ‘Gothick’ garden fabricks, Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire.[[18]] This was a landmark in the rise of the Gothic Revival. In 1803 S. P. Cockerell (1754-1827), otherwise far more consistently Classical than Wyatt, was erecting for his brother, the Indian nabob Sir Charles Cockerell, a vast mansion in Gloucestershire in an Indian mode. The design of Sezincote was based on early sketches made by the landscape gardener Humphry Repton (1752-1818) and all its details were derived from the drawings Thomas Daniell (1749-1840) had made in India fifteen years before and published in The Antiquities of India in 1800. The ‘Indian Revival’ (so to call it) had little success; in these years only the stables built in 1805 by William Porden (c. 1755-1822) for the Royal Pavilion at Brighton followed Sezincote’s lead.
The Neo-Gothic of Fonthill, however, a mode that had roots extending back into the second quarter of the eighteenth century, is illustrated in a profusion of examples by Wyatt, Porden, and many others. None, however, seems to have succeeded as well as Beckford and Wyatt at Fonthill in achieving the ‘Sublime’ by mere dimension. The characteristic Gothic country houses of this period were likely to be elaborately Tudor, like Wyatt’s Ashridge begun in 1808 and Porden’s Eaton Hall of 1803-12, or lumpily Castellated like Hawarden of 1804-9 by Thomas Cundy I (1765-1825) and Eastnor of 1808-15 by Sir Robert Smirke (1781-1867). The last, moreover, differs very little from Adam’s Culzean of 1777-90.