In England the Greek Revival was barely established as the dominant mode in the twenties before it was challenged. Barry, as has been noted earlier, began his career with the building of cheap Commissioners’ Gothic churches, but his favourite mode was the Renaissance Revival. We have seen that in Germany the Renaissance Revival may be considered to begin with Klenze’s Munich work of the mid twenties. Now, in 1827-8, Barry built the Brunswick Chapel, later St Andrew’s, at Hove in a quattrocento mode—the exterior, that is, for the modest interior can hardly be thus characterized, and in its present form includes various changes since Barry’s time. The façade looks rather nineteenth-century French to modern eyes; yet comparable French churches, such as Lequeux’s Saint-Jacques-Saint-Christophe in Paris, are mostly from five to fifteen years later (see Chapter [3]). Barry doubtless turned to some of the available French publications on the Italian Renaissance for his detail, most probably to the Architecture toscane of Grandjean de Montigny and Famin, but he certainly did not derive the design of his church from current Continental practice.
Following immediately upon the Brunswick Chapel, Barry built for Thomas Attree of Brighton a symmetrical Italian Villa, now the Xavierian College, with an architectural garden setting. This was part of a scheme, otherwise unexecuted, for surrounding Queen’s Park, east of the town, with a range of detached houses, some Italianate, some Tudoresque, in an extensive suburban development of the order of Nash’s only slightly earlier Park Villages. The intended effect can best be seen in Decimus Burton’s Calverley Estate at Tunbridge Wells carried out over the years 1828 to 1852.
Far more important, however, was the fact that Barry in 1829 won with a palazzo composition the competition for the new Travellers’ Club. This was built in Pall Mall in the next two years beside the prominent corner site where Burton’s astylar but still Grecian Athenaeum was rising. Raphaelesque on the front—although not as derivative from Raphael’s Pandolfini Palace in Florence as was claimed at the time—but rather Venetian on the rear, this clubhouse notably eschews the flat barrenness and the giant orders of the Grecian mode to throw emphasis on the elegant aedicular treatment of the windows and the bold cornicione which crowns the top (Plate [35B]).
Very soon Charles Fowler (1791-1867), who owned the copy of Durand’s treatise now in the Library of the Royal Institute of British Architects, was introducing a more utilitarian sort of Italianism in the Hungerford Market in London of 1831-3, now long gone, and in the Lower Market at Exeter of 1835-6. There the Durandesque and almost basilican interiors, destroyed in 1942, contrasted markedly with the Greek Doric detailing of the façade of his Upper Market of 1837-8.
In 1836 Barry designed a larger edifice of the palazzo type, the Manchester Athenaeum built in 1837-9. But this was overshadowed in size, in prominence, and in quality by the new Reform Club next door to the Travellers’ in Pall Mall; for this he won the competition in 1837, and it was built in 1838-40 (Plate [35B]). Here his model was obviously San Gallo’s Farnese Palace in Rome. But there are many differences such as the unaccented entrance, the balustrade which sets the façades back from the pavement, the simpler and more San Gallesque top storey, the corner emphasis provided by prominent chimneys, not to speak of the metal-and-glass roofing of the central court.
Barry’s two Pall Mall clubs provided architectural paradigms much followed through the forties and well into the third quarter of the century. Moreover, W. H. Leeds (1786-1866), in the text of a monograph on the Travellers’ Club-House published in 1839, developed at some length the arguments for a Renaissance Revival. A little less evidently than the Continental work of these years in Renaissance modes, but none the less truly, Barry’s palazzi represent a continuation of Romantic Classicism. In the block-like unity of the external masses, the regularity of the fenestration, and the extreme orderliness of the planning his palazzo mode is at least as characteristic an aspect of later Romantic Classicism in Great Britain as is the Rundbogenstil on the Continent.
This is considerably less true of two other directions in which Barry first turned in the thirties. It would be premature, however, to discuss here the design with which Barry won the competition for the new Houses of Parliament in 1836 (Plate [54]). As the first major public monument to be designed anywhere in Gothic this constituted above all an epoch-making step in the English revolt against Romantic Classicism (see Chapter [6]).
This is not so much the case with Barry’s first and only important essay in the ‘Jacobethan’ mode—or the Anglo-Italian as he preferred to call it—the remodelling of Highclere Castle in Hampshire, proposed as early as 1837 and carried out over the next two decades (Plate [37A]). Despite the Picturesque effect of its towered and bristling silhouette, this great country house rigidly maintains the quadrangular plan of the Reform Club and is almost as regular as that in composition, and even more coldly crisp in its detailing. Much the same can be said of Mentmore House in Buckinghamshire, built by Sir Joseph Paxton (1803-65) in 1852-4 in a very similar vein but more directly derived from Smithson’s Elizabethan Wollaton Hall near Nottingham. In general, however, the extremely popular Jacobethan Revival of these years, even more than the contemporary revival of the style François I in France, represents a reaction not merely against the Greek Revival, as does the palazzo mode, but against the basic disciplines of Romantic Classicism and was one of the major stylistic vehicles of the later Picturesque.
On the other hand, the utilization of pre-Gothic medieval forms in England in this period, so closely similar in its result to the Romanesquoid aspect of the Rundbogenstil, seems to have been only partly Picturesque in intention. From the twenties on a very considerable number of churches, mostly small, had Norman Romanesque detail, but usually there was little or no attempt to break away from the hall-like tradition of the Late Georgian church in their plans. However, three rather large churches that are early medieval in inspiration but not Norman in detail deserve particular mention, for they are among the finest, though not the most historically significant, built in Britain in the early forties.
St Mary and St Nicholas’s, Wilton, built by T. H. Wyatt (1807-80) and David Brandon (1813-97) in 1840-6 for Sydney Herbert and his Russian mother, might almost have risen in the Prussia or the Baden of this period. However, this Italian Romanesque basilica, with tall, detached campanile and rich internal polychromy of Cosmati-work brought from Italy, is rather more archaeological than Persius’s or Hübsch’s churches in Germany. On the other hand, the so much more original Christ Church of 1840-2 in Streatham, south of London, by J. W. Wild (1814-92) is so similar to Prussian work that some knowledge on Wild’s part of Schinkel’s suburban-church projects of a decade earlier might almost be assumed (Plate [36]). Although the exposed yellow brickwork and the touches of external brick polychromy are notably premonitory of the next period, the splendid obelisk-like campanile and the crisp ranges of clerestory windows, for all their pointed tops, are quite as much within the range of Romantic Classicism as the German churches that this recalls. The handling of the galleries of the interior had local precedent in Soane’s churches of the twenties as well as in Schinkel’s of the thirties. Although the barrel vaults are presumably only of plaster, St Jude’s, Bethnal Green, in London, built by Henry Clutton (1819-93) in 1844-6, has an impressive cruciform interior. The exterior here is notably Germanic with two thin towers flanking the great polygonal apse.