But these three churches, for all their individual excellence, are exceptional in England. They are related to the broad contemporary current of the Renaissance Revival that Barry had set under way only in rejecting Grecian sanctions even more completely than he. Barry was himself too versatile ever quite to repeat the strict palazzo formula of the Reform Club, although he almost came to that in the British Embassy in Istanbul of 1845-7. For this he provided sketches as early as 1842 and later emended the plans of the local executant architect, W. J. Smith. This structure, carrying the Renaissance Revival to, or even beyond, one edge of the western world as Grandjean de Montigny did to Rio de Janeiro at the other edge, is considerably larger than the Reform Club and rather bleak, though splendidly sited and very dignified indeed. At Bridgewater House in London of 1847-57, however, Barry enriched the palazzo paradigm quite considerably, not only by the introduction of a good deal of carved work but also by breaking the continuity of the garden front towards the Park in order to emphasize the end bays. This personal compositional device is even more conspicuous on the river front of his Gothic Houses of Parliament.
It was for clubhouses and business buildings that Renaissance models were most generally used in England after 1840. For the remodelling of the Carlton Club in 1847 Sydney Smirke, who had provided the winning design in a select competition, based himself, not on San Gallo’s Farnese Palace in sixteenth-century Rome as Barry had done at the Reform Club next door, but on Sansovino’s Library in sixteenth-century Venice. Before this was finished in the mid fifties, C. Octavius Parnell (?-1865) and his partner Alfred Smith had erected across Pall Mall in 1848-51 the Army and Navy Club based on Sansovino’s Palazzo Corner della Cà Grande. Both are now gone.
But if these architects in London were moving in the late forties towards an altogether richer and more plastic sort of High Renaissance design, from which almost all traces of the cold asceticism of Romantic Classicism had departed, most provincial architects were content to stick fairly close to the Farnese Palace model of the Reform Club well down into the sixties. This was most notably true in the design of edifices for financial institutions. In 1840 George Alexander (?-1884), who had made his own study of the cinquecento in Italy, designed the Savings Bank in Bath as a little Reform Club; the next year in the Brunswick Buildings in Liverpool A. & G. Williams applied the formula to a much larger block of general offices. Henceforth the mode was solidly established for almost a generation.
Barry usually gave a characteristically Italian Villa bent to the many country houses that he remodelled by introducing a tall loggia-topped tower (used to store water for the more elaborate sanitation now demanded) placed asymmetrically at one side of the main block. The first of these was at Trentham Park, near Stoke-on-Trent, where a second later rose in the stable court; the finest are those at Walton House near London of 1837 and at Shrubland in Norfolk of 1848-50. In these the inherited Georgian blocks became subordinate parts of rich three-dimensional compositions almost like the villas that Schinkel and Persius built at Potsdam. The rebuilding of Osborne House as a country retreat for Queen Victoria on the Isle of Wight gave Royal sanction to the Italian Villa mode. Unfortunately she did not employ Barry; the work was done in 1845-6 and 1847-9 by the builder Thomas Cubitt and the design was dictated, if not actually prepared, by Prince Albert.
Despite the continued use of Greek forms for certain purposes and in some areas, the controls of Romantic Classicism were loosening rapidly in Great Britain in the forties. A real change of style was at hand; but since certain stylisms, such as the conventional use of Renaissance forms, tended to continue indefinitely, it is hard to know just where to draw the line chronologically.
The Geological Museum in Piccadilly in London, built in the late forties by Pennethorne, Nash’s protégé and his successor at the Office of Works, was far more successful than the ballroom wing he added in the early fifties to Buckingham Palace. Even that, however, was a considerable improvement on the curious façade—more Neo-Baroque than Neo-Renaissance—with which Edward Blore (1787-1879) masked the front of Nash’s edifice in 1847. The Museum was more successful precisely because its exteriors retained the regularity and severity characteristic of Romantic Classicism. Still later, the Free Trade Hall built by Edward Walters (1808-72) in Manchester in 1853-6 followed the lusher Sansovinesque Italianism of Smirke’s Carlton Club, while his many handsome warehouses there moved ever farther away from the severity of Barry’s Athenaeum despite their generic palazzo character. Yet the Corn Exchange in Leeds, erected as late as 1860 by Cuthbert Brodrick (1825-1905), is still Romantic Classical in the cool regularity of its diamond-rusticated walls broken only by ranges of plain arches (Plate [37B]).
There can be little question, however, that his Town Hall in Leeds of 1855-9, despite the reiterative grandeur of its giant colonnades and the evident derivation of its principal interior from St George’s Hall in Liverpool, is in English terms definitely ‘High Victorian’ (Plate [78A]). If the Corn Exchange can hardly be considered typically Early Victorian in character, and in any case is some ten years too late in date, it might almost be called Louis Philippe, so close is it to some French work of the 40s.
Run-of-the-mill English railway stations of the forties, mostly designed by engineers and minor architects, clearly rank in their dullness with the most utilitarian French work of that decade. They indicate to what depths of conventionality late Romantic Classicism in England had sunk by this time. Yet Lewis Cubitt’s long-demolished Bricklayers’ Arms Station in London of 1842-4, with its entrance screen compounded of rustic Italian elements derived from the books of Charles Parker,[[81]] seems to have had considerable plastic interest. Moreover, the great plain arches at the front of his King’s Cross Station of 1850-2 (Plate [66A]) remain to signalize to every traveller a masterpiece of the period more than worthy of comparison with Duquesney’s somewhat earlier Gare de l’Est in Paris (Plate [22B]).
On the whole, however, for all that King’s Cross is one of the major late monuments of the rationalistic side of Romantic Classicism, it is better to consider railway stations in relation to their sheds of iron and glass, technically, that is, rather than stylistically (see Chapter [7]). They illustrate especially well something which the stylistic preoccupations of the first half of the nineteenth century tended to mask from most contemporaries, the success with which new functional needs were satisfied in this period by the bold use of new materials and new types of construction.
Yet the most characteristic monuments of Romantic Classicism in Europe after those prime urbanistic symbols of Napoleonic or counter-Napoleonic triumph, the arches, the columns, and the obelisks that rose in all the great cities from Petersburg to Madrid, are the museums and libraries, starting with Soane’s Dulwich Gallery, begun in 1811, and ending with Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, opened in 1850. These are useful, yes; moreover, they serve what were effectively new purposes, purposes closely related to the rising ideal of providing cultural opportunities for the general public. On the whole, however, they could be carried out—and so they usually were down to Labrouste’s library—with established methods of construction; while their cultural significance—and in the case of the sculpture galleries from Klenze’s Glyptothek, begun in 1816, to Bindesbøll’s Thorwaldsen Museum, opened in 1848, their very contents—seemed to justify, if not indeed to demand, the use of Greek or Roman forms.