The Gothic Revival in America, deriving after 1840 from Pugin and the Camdenians, was a much more alien movement than the Greek Revival. In the British Dominions and Colonies, even though the characteristic production of this period is in many ways more similar to that of the United States than to that of the homeland, the Neo-Gothic achievement appears somewhat less exotic. However, St John’s in Hobart, Tasmania, by John Lee Archer, which was completed in 1835 in the most rudimentary sort of Commissioners’ Gothic, is far inferior to the granite churches of its period in the Boston area. From that to Holy Trinity in Hobart, completed by James Blackburn in 1847, the advance in mere competence is very evident. Yet, as in the case of Upjohn in America, the Norman church that Blackburn built for the Presbyterians of Glenorchy and even more his Congregational Church at Newtown, an asymmetrically towered Italian Villa edifice, may well be preferred to his Gothic work.
Greenway’s Government House Stables of 1817-19 in Sydney, Australia, were already Castellated, but in a modest eighteenth-century way. M. W. Lewis’s Camden church of 1840-9 was based on plans sent out by Blore and simply executed in red brick. In W. W. Wardell (1823-99), who emigrated as late as 1858, Australia finally obtained an experienced Neo-Gothic architect of real ability. He had already made his mark in England a decade before his departure with Our Lady of Victories, Clapham, in London; but even that very decent early church of his required no specific mention in the English section of this chapter. His Australian work is too late to be considered here (see Chapter [11]).
Across the Atlantic, communications were doubtless quicker than with the Antipodes, and the cultural climate of Canada was undoubtedly more similar to that of the homeland. The first important Neo-Gothic work in Canada, however, was built for the French and not the British community. Notre Dame, the Catholic Cathedral of Montreal, was originally designed and erected by an Irish architect, James O’Donnell (1774-1830), in 1824-9 somewhat to the disgust of most French Canadians, who considered O’Donnell’s Gothic to be Anglican when in fact it was merely Georgian. Equipped later with western towers and redecorated internally with operatic sumptuousness in the seventies, it is not easy to realize just what Notre Dame was like when O’Donnell completed it. It was bigger, certainly, but not more advanced than the New England churches of a few years later.
In 1845 Wills arrived in Canada from England and began the Anglican Cathedral at Fredericton, New Brunswick, as a moderate-sized cruciform parish-church with central tower, the whole of rather run-of-the-mill Camdenian character despite its pretensions. Very similar, but considerably larger and richer, is the Montreal cathedral which he began a decade later in 1856. His American churches, though smaller and less elaborate, have somewhat more character. Canadians must have sensed Wills’s inadequacy almost at once, for both Butterfield and G. G. Scott were asked to send out church designs in the forties. The former provided in 1848 a scheme for a more elaborate east end for Wills’s Fredericton Cathedral, which had been started only three years before. Scott’s Cathedral in St John’s, Newfoundland, initiated in 1846, deserves a relatively important place in the roster of his churches as Butterfield’s New Brunswick work does not. But this large edifice was completed only some forty years later by his son (G. G. II, 1839-97). Even the stone used here was imported from Scotland.
As in the United States, there is plenty of more-or-less Gothic domestic work in Canada, most of it relatively late. An early and rather pretentious secular edifice was the so-called Old Building of Trinity College, Toronto, erected in 1851 by Kivas Tully (1820-1905). This was a by no means incompetent example of Collegiate Gothic, but more like Wilkins’s or Rickman’s work of the twenties at Cambridge than the advanced Camdenian edifices of its own period. Canadian Neo-Gothic rose to a certain autochthonous distinction only in the next period (see Chapter [10]).
If early illustrations of the Picturesque point of view and of the mature Gothic Revival are on the whole of minor interest in the English-speaking world outside Great Britain, that whole world from California to Tasmania was absorbing the propaganda of the English exponents of the Picturesque and the Gothic Revival. This had its effect in the succeeding period when the High Victorian Gothic of England was exploited to more considerable purpose than the Neo-Gothic of the Early Victorian period. By the time a great English critic came to the support of the Gothic Revival, John Ruskin (1819-1900), he had almost from the original publication of his Seven Lamps of Architecture in 1849 more readers beyond the seas than at home.[[137]]
Neither the Picturesque nor the Gothic Revival has the same importance on the Continent of Europe as in English-speaking countries. The Picturesque point of view was carried abroad by the great British artistic invention of the eighteenth century, the English garden—jardin anglais, englischer Garten, giardino inglese, jardin inglès, etc., to muster the various well-established and revelatory foreign terms for the more or less naturalistic mode that succeeded the architecturally ordered French gardens of the Le Nôtre type. By 1800 the Picturesque was as familiar in theory as were the international tenets of Romantic Classicism. But for all the garden fabricks that were built in Europe in the English taste, the point of view tended to remain alien. Moreover, from the continuance of Orléans Cathedral[[138]] in Gothic, ordered as early as 1707 by Louis XIV though not finally finished until 1829, to Schinkel’s painted Gothic visions of the opening of the nineteenth century, there is no lack of evidence of Continental interest in Gothic forms. In France there was also a very considerable theoretical interest in Gothic methods of construction that can hardly be matched in eighteenth-century England (see Introduction). But there followed in the early decades of the nineteenth century no such effective crystallization of an earlier dilettante interest in the Gothic as in England, no popular fad for building fake castles, no flood of cheap Commissioners’ Churches.
Yet, in France as in England, a new and more serious phase of the Gothic Revival did open in the late thirties, stimulated by the ideals of Catholic Revival of a series of writers from Chateaubriand to Montalembert. No great Gothic public monument like the Houses of Parliament in London was initiated in these years in Paris—nor for that matter at any later date—but several churches designed around 1840 were at least intended to be as exemplary as Pugin’s; they were also considerably more ambitious in their size and their elaboration than most of those his Catholic clients and the Camdenians’ Anglican ones were sponsoring in England at this point.
A curious example of the change in taste is the Chapelle-Saint-Louis at Dreux.[[139]] The original chapel was built in 1816-22 by an architect named Cramail (or Cramailler) as a Classical rotunda to serve as the mausoleum of the Orléans family. In 1839 Louis Philippe ordered its remodelling and enlargement in Gothic style by P.-B. Lefranc (1795-1856), desiring thus to associate the Orleanist dynasty with the medieval glories of French royalty in a manner already fashionable[[140]] with intellectuals to the left and to the right, if not with many architects. The new exterior, completed in 1848 just as the Orléans rule came to an end, is in a very lacy and unplausible sort of Gothick, not without a certain still rather eighteenth-century Rococo charm but quite inharmonious with the Classical interior. Like another Royal mausoleum of these years, the Chapelle-Saint-Ferdinand in the Avenue Pershing in Neuilly, built in 1843 in memory of an Orléans prince who had been killed in an accident near its site, the Chapelle-Saint-Louis has stained glass windows designed in 1844 by no less an artist than Ingres. These are even less appropriate in association with Lefranc’s Gothic than with the Romanesquoid mode that the elderly Fontaine—who knew, like Talleyrand, how to maintain his position under several successive regimes—used for the Neuilly chapel. They are hardly superior in quality, moreover, to the glass, whether imported from Germany or produced locally, that was being used in the early forties in England for Neo-Gothic churches.
A more important Gothic project of this date than the Chapelle-Saint-Louis was that for the large new Paris church of Sainte-Clotilde prepared in 1840 by F.-C. Gau (1790-1853), German-born but a pupil of Lebas. Doubts as to the extensive use of iron proposed by Gau held up the initiation of the construction of Sainte-Clotilde until 1846, so that several provincial Neo-Gothic edifices of some consequence were executed first. These may be compared, but only to their disadvantage, with Pugin’s churches of around 1840 as regards their plausibility, their intrinsic architectonic qualities, and the elegance of their detail. However, several of them are larger and more ambitious—being Catholic churches in a Catholic country—than are even his various cathedrals.