The dissolution of the dominant stylistic discipline, hardly completed even in the fifties, had nevertheless begun very early indeed. In terms of historical significance, if not of absolute achievement, the Picturesque rises rapidly in comparative importance from the time of Wyatt’s Fonthill Abbey in the 1790s. Beside Soane’s crisp Bank interiors it is necessary to carry in the mind’s eye the prophetic image which his renderer J. M. Gandy (1771-1843) provided of them as a Romantic ruin; nor should the vast dream-like Gothic cathedrals that Schinkel made the centre of some of his early paintings be forgotten in the cool presence of his Grecian Schauspielhaus and Museum. Fortunately no one is likely in looking at Barry’s palazzi to forget that they are contemporary with his Gothic Houses of Parliament; one does, however, tend to forget that the career of his associate Pugin as protagonist of the mature Gothic Revival ended well before Barry’s did as the chief English protagonist of the Renaissance Revival. Earlier the Gothic Revival was hardly more than a special aspect of the Picturesque; with Pugin, however, it became a major movement in its own right and actually anti-Picturesque in theory, if rarely so in practice. To a considerable extent, moreover, the Gothic Revival usurped during the forties the centre of the stage in England, if hardly to the same degree in other countries even in the following decades.
CHAPTER 6
THE PICTURESQUE AND THE GOTHIC REVIVAL
The principal modern treatise on the Picturesque with a capital P, Christopher Hussey’s of 1927, is subtitled ‘Studies in a Point of View’. By the opening years of the nineteenth century the term had come to have a far more precise, if also a more complex, meaning than the adjective ‘picturesque’ as it is generally used today. But Hussey is perfectly correct: the Picturesque is no more a style than is the Sublime, it is a point of view. That point of view nevertheless influenced architecture[[105]] increasingly as the first half of the nineteenth century wore on. It had a solvent, and eventually a destructive, effect on the dominant Romantic Classical style as has already been suggested in discussing the later work of various leading architects in several countries.
The Picturesque had its early eighteenth-century origins[[106]] in England, and its most notable theorists were English. In the first quarter of the century, moreover, there was no British architect so resolutely Grecian that he did not, either on his own initiative or in deference to his clients’ wishes, experiment with alternative modes in conscious pursuit of the Picturesque. Despite the stringencies of the Greek Revival as represented, early, in Wilkins’s Downing College or, later, in Smirke’s British Museum, Smirke had built several Castellated mansions in the years before Waterloo and Wilkins the Gothic screen and the hall range at King’s College, Cambridge, in the twenties; while at the National Gallery in the thirties he handled standard Classical elements in a markedly Picturesque way. Nash was the initiator of one characteristically Picturesque mode, the asymmetrically towered Italian Villa, at Cronkhill in 1802; he also exploited in an exemplary way another longer-established one, the Rustic Cottage, in Blaise Hamlet in 1811 (Plate [50A]). The score or more of Castellated mansions that Nash built were always Picturesque and irregular whether their detailing was Norman[[107]] or some sort of Gothic. Above all, he handled the urbanistic development which was his greatest achievement in a thoroughly Picturesque way. Soane’s Picturesque was of a less usual order and his personal tendency was as much or more towards the Sublime, otherwise a largely forgotten category after 1810.
But from 1810 on new buildings in which the basic principles of Romantic Classicism were ignored and exotic stylistic alternatives to the Grecian exploited were generally larger, more prominent, and also more creatively original than they had ever been before. C. A. Busby (1788-1838) was responsible as late as 1827 for one of the finest, most formal, and most extensive examples of Romantic Classical urbanism, Kemp Town at Brighton. Yet in 1814 he exhibited at the Royal Academy his design for Gwrych Castle, completed in 1815, which he was building in North Wales near Abergele, presumably in collaboration with his client, Lloyd Bamford Hesketh, a notable amateur (Plate [49]).
The next year Nash began for the Regent the transformation of his favourite residence, the Royal Pavilion[[108]] at Brighton. This was at that time an elegant early example of a Romantic Classical house as first remodelled and enlarged by Henry Holland[[109]] (1745-1806) just before the Napoleonic Wars began. Nash now made of it an extraordinary oriental confection (as had already been proposed by Repton[[110]] in 1806). Part Chinese, part Saracenic, and part Indian, this is quite in the spirit of Porden’s earlier Dome near by (Plate [48]). Festive and frivolous, the Pavilion resembles an oversized garden fabrick or sumptuously ornamented marquee; but the scale is fully architectural, even monumental, both externally and in the principal apartments. Not least interesting is Nash’s frank use of visible iron elements. These are not masonry-scaled like the columns he employed later in the Regent Street Quadrant and on Carlton House Terrace, but delicate and playfully decorative. The pierced ‘Chinese’ staircases of 1815-18 have naturalistically coloured bamboo detailing and the tops of the four columns that carry the monitor over the kitchen of 1818-21 are embellished with copper palm-leaves (Plate [58A]).
The Pavilion had no real sequel; even the Regent, King as George IV from 1820, tired of it almost as soon as it was finished. Indeed, he forsook Brighton for good in 1823 just as the general building activity there,[[111]] commonly but incorrectly called ‘Regency’, was getting under way. Turning his attention to Windsor Castle, the King employed Sir Jeffrey Wyatville (1776-1840) to remodel the accumulated mass of heterogeneous construction there into a Picturesque mansion of the Castellated sort in which the real medieval elements were quite submerged. But Windsor, being much more obviously a remodelling than was the Pavilion when Nash completed it, is not a very exemplary specimen of a fake castle. Busby’s Gwrych, set against a hanging wood, its round and square towers simply detailed and tightly though asymmetrically composed, is a better instance of that abstract sculptural massing which critics of the mid century would sometimes define as ‘architecturesque’ (Plate [49]). For this sort of three-dimensional composition the Italian Villa mode provided on the whole a better vehicle. Wyatville, for example, did his best to turn the vast regular mass of late seventeenth-century Chatsworth[[112]] into a more Picturesque adjunct to its landscape setting by Capability Brown (1715-83), by adding a long service wing on the north side and terminating that with a very large and tall loggia-topped tower.
Well before George IV undertook the remodelling of Windsor, a relatively modest mansion linked the Castellated mode more closely to the rising enthusiasm for the Middle Ages. The author of the immensely popular Waverley novels, Sir Walter Scott, employed Blore in 1816 to build Abbotsford near Melrose in Roxburghshire in this vein—it was much extended along the same lines by William Atkinson (c. 1773-1839) in 1822-3. With its definitely Scottish features Abbotsford initiated a special mode, the Scottish Baronial, that eventually received Royal sanction when Queen Victoria acquired Balmoral Castle near Ballater in 1848, a modest residence built in the late thirties by John Smith of Aberdeen. At the time she and Prince Albert first occupied this Scottish retreat Balmoral was quite small, but it was reconstructed in 1853-5 on a vastly larger scale in the same Scottish Baronial mode by William Smith, son of the original architect, working in close collaboration with Prince Albert. Thus the Queen’s two private residences, Osborne and Balmoral, both in part at least designed by the Consort, illustrated—in neither case very happily—the two major types of determinedly Picturesque design for edifices of some consequence, the Italian Villa and the Castellated; the viability of the Rustic Cottage mode was necessarily rather limited and hardly suitable for Royal use.
Castellated design was not restricted to the field of country-house building. At Conway, in Wales, the engineer Thomas Telford (1757-1834) in his suspension bridge of 1819-24 and, after him, Robert Stephenson and his associated architect Francis Thompson in the tubular bridge[[113]] there of 1845-9 castellated the piers out of deference to the nearby thirteenth-century Castle. Another example of Engineers’ Castellated is the first Temple Meads Railway Station at Bristol, built in 1839-40 by I. K. Brunel (1806-59). Brunel, however, had preferred Egyptian forms for the piers of the Clifton Suspension Bridge[[114]] near Bristol that he designed in 1829.