The towered Italian Villa[[101]] was introduced by John Notman (1810-65) in Bishop George W. Doane’s house at Burlington, NJ., in 1837 and soon actively propagandized by A. J. Downing (1815-52) in his influential books (see Chapters [6] and [15]). Indeed, the Barryesque Renaissance mode was also probably first introduced by the Scottish-born Notman at the Philadelphia Atheneum[[102]] built in 1845-7 (Plate [47A]). These non-Grecian, yet still basically Romantic Classical, modes were in relatively common use by 1850, though not very much earlier. Young, for example, who had made his reputation with the saucer-domed but otherwise Greek Custom House[[103]] that he built in Boston in 1837-47, substituted a somewhat Barryesque manner for Mills’s Grecian as the current mode for Federal buildings[[104]] when he became Supervising Architect in 1853. But neither Notman nor Young was a Barry—nor even as competent at such design as the youthful Tefft—and the most notable result of the waning of the Greek Revival in the forties, in the East at any rate—it waned much more slowly in the South and West—was the rise of a rather considerable variety of Picturesque modes of suburban-house design, of which the Italianate was only one (see Chapters [6] and [15]). In cities, the shift from the characteristic granite or, more usually, hard red brick with white trim to the chocolate tones of brownstone, used alone or with brick, is much more indicative of a general change of taste than any widespread exploitation of Renaissance forms.
A fine relatively early Italian Villa such as the Stebbins house of 1849 on Crescent St, off Maple St, in Springfield, Mass., by Henry A. Sykes belongs to the realm of Romantic Classicism like Schinkel’s or Barry’s country houses in this mode (Plate [43A]). But on the whole the Italian Villa in America is rather one of the many vehicles of the Picturesque reaction against a doctrinaire Greek Revival. This fact was well illustrated in one by Eidlitz, also in Springfield, on Maple Street, that was built of brick with much wooden ‘gingerbread’ of a vaguely Tyrolean order and latterly, at least, painted a warm pink where Sykes’s villa is painted white with brown trim. Sykes’s originality within the Italian Villa mode is most happily illustrated by the former observatory at Amherst College, now known as the Octagon, whose stuccoed polygonal elements stand in such interesting contrast to the severe row of red-brick dormitories and chapel behind. Not often did the mid century add so effectively to groups of buildings produced in earlier decades.
Just as the Iberian peninsula was in general devoid of significant architectural activity in the first half of the nineteenth century, so in the Spanish and Portuguese lands beyond the seas there came no early wave of autochthonous Romantic Classicism to submerge and succeed the Baroque that had flourished there to the end of the colonial period and beyond. In Brazil Dom Pedro, later the first Brazilian Emperor, under whose rule the centre of gravity of Portuguese civilization moved from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, imported in 1816 a group of French artists. They were expected to found a new post-Baroque Brazilian culture much as Alexander I’s architects had done a little earlier in Russia. One was the French architect Grandjean de Montigny, author with Famin of that most influential work L’Architecture toscane to which all Europe turned for quattrocento models, who had been employed by Jerome Bonaparte in Westphalia as long as Napoleon’s Empire lasted. He erected in Rio in 1826 the first home for the new Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, founded of course on the model of the Parisian École des Beaux-Arts, the Market, and the extant Custom House. He also trained a group of Brazilians who gave local architectural production an Empire flavour that lasted until it was superseded well after the mid century by a wave of Second Empire influence.
In vernacular building traditional treatments were often maintained in Brazil, notably the use of azulejos (glazed tiles) for wall surfaces and of rich painted colour for the ubiquitous stucco. But more sophisticated work can be very French indeed. For example, the Itamaratí Palace in Rio of 1851-4 by J. M. J. Rebelo, a pupil of Grandjean de Montigny, might well be taken for a hôtel particulier erected in the new quarters of Paris in the earlier decades of the century (Plate [47B]). Beautifully restored, this now houses the Brazilian Foreign Office—one says ‘Itamaratí’ as one says ‘Quai d’Orsay’. Rebelo also built the Summer Palace at Petrópolis. The Santa Isabel Theatre at Recife, Pernambuco, built about 1845, which is so like a French provincial theatre of this period, is by another French architect who had settled in Brazil in 1840, L.-L. Vauthier.
In Chile, on the other side of the South American continent, C.-F. Brunet-Debaines (1799-1855), a brother of the architect who built the Museum and Library at Le Havre, was employed on government work in Santiago. But the schools that such French architects assisted in founding had more significance than the few buildings they were able to erect. Henceforth, Latin America would be less dependent in architecture on the Spanish and Portuguese homelands than on Paris. The character of the larger cities outside their colonial cores—if, indeed, more than a few early monuments remain extant—was henceforth determined by this fact. However, it is the Second Empire and not the First which left the more visible mark; for the various capitals, some like Montevideo in Uruguay almost without earlier architectural history, saw their greatest expansion in the later decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth.
The establishment of a Latin American architecture of really autochthonous character, as distinguished from the continuance of various local vernacular building traditions, had to await the present period (see Chapters [22] and [25]). Once again French influence had a significant role to play. But between the arrival of Grandjean de Montigny in 1816 and Le Corbusier’s first visit to South America in 1929 that continent took little part in the major architectural developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On the other hand, the United States, building on the professional foundations laid by Latrobe and exploiting to the full new structural materials and methods, rose before the nineteenth century was over to a position of world leadership (see Chapters [13], [14], and [15]).
What is true of Latin America is not altogether untrue of the British Dominions in the New World and at the Antipodes, as also of various British Colonies throughout the rest of the world. No French architects were imported, of course, and the links with England remained very close and strong. As in all colonial situations, however, the transfer of new ideas from the homeland was slow and inefficient and the capacity of émigré architects usually rather low. No Latrobes or Havilands seem to have gone to the Dominions; and the Greek Revival was hardly accepted before the forties, when it was already passing out of favour in the United States.
The first professional to work in Australia, Francis Greenway (1777-1837), who arrived in Sydney in 1814 as a convict and almost at once became Governor Macquarie’s architect, remained faithful in most of his public work to the modes of his eighteenth-century youth in Bristol. But his house of 1822 for Robert Campbell, Jr, in Bligh Street in Sydney showed that he had real skill as a designer of up-to-date Regency villas. Canada had no early architect of comparable ability to serve the British community.
As the western world expanded in the nineteenth century, significant architectural achievement tended to move outwards from the old centres on the Tiber, the Seine, and the Thames; but that movement was always very uneven, and still remains so today. Russia was building more and finer structures of Western European character than Spain and Portugal; while the United States, not yet fantastically disparate in size and population, produced many more productive Romantic Classical architects than either Holland or Sweden. All the same, the architectural leadership of the western world remained for at least a generation longer in the old centres of Europe; our story must return to where it started in order to proceed beyond the mid century or even to complete the account of the period 1810-50.
Romantic Classicism came to no sudden end. If in Vienna a monumental Grecian Parliament house could rise as late as the seventies, so in the desert of Arizona the Crystal Palace Saloon of 1878 at Tombstone is still in the Greek Revival vernacular. From the very first, on the other hand, there was some admixture of the Picturesque in Romantic Classicism. Almost all the architects that have been mentioned, both of the earlier and of the later generation, were more eclectic in their practice and even in their theories than this account of their major works has made altogether evident. But in the main, down into the forties, Romantic Classicism, while increasingly eclectic, remained a coherent style whose canons controlled most of the accepted variants to the Grecian.