A characteristic urbanistic development of the seventies in Copenhagen, the Søtorvet built in 1873-6 by Vilhelm Petersen (1830-1913) and Ferdinand Vilhelm Jensen (1837-90), is French not German in its ultimate inspiration. This grandiose pavilioned and mansarded range of four tall blocks forms a shallow U-shaped square along a canal (Figure [16]). Its definitely Second Empire character may not, all the same, have derived directly from Paris but via German or English intermediaries, so much more typical is this of the international than of the truly Parisian mode of the third quarter of the century.
As late as 1893-4 the much more conspicuous Magasin du Nord department store, built by A. C. Jensen (1847-1913) and his partner H. Glaesel in the Kongens Nytorv in Copenhagen, also carried the high mansarded roofs of the new Louvre, both flat-sided and convex-curved, above its end and centre pavilions. The detailing was chastened, however, by memories of local palaces and mansions in the nearby Amalie quarter of the city, where Jensen had worked on the completion of the eighteenth-century Marble Church. The Magasin du Nord thus combines two characteristic aspects of the architecture of the period, evident in most countries but rarely thus joined: a reflection of Napoleon III’s Paris, elsewhere reaching its peak around 1870, and a revival of the style of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, generally beginning about a decade later.
In Sweden also there was some Second Empire influence, although nothing very notable resulted from it. The Jernkontovets Building in Stockholm erected by the brothers Kumlien (A.F., 1833-?; K.H., 1837-97) in 1873-5 has a high mansard and pavilions combined with a respectably academic treatment of the façades that is quite different from the bombast of the Søtorvet. Bern’s Restaurant in Stockholm of 1886 by Åbom, whose more conservative Renaissance Revival theatre of thirty years earlier has been mentioned, is similarly Parisian, particularly in the decorations that were provided by Isaeus.
With I. G. Clason (1856-1930) the tide of eclecticism in Sweden turned more nationalistic. The Northern Renaissance of his Northern Museum, built in 1889-1907, parallels somewhat belatedly the Meistersinger mode in Germany; but it also shows a more refined and delicate touch, somewhat like that of George and of Collcutt in England. As in most other countries, the revival of the native sixteenth-century style was soon succeeded by a revival of the Baroque, here rather academically restrained. This phase is most conspicuously represented in Stockholm by the grouped Parliament House and National Bank of 1897-1905 by Aron Johansson (1860-1936). In the nineties Ferdinand Boberg (1860-1946) was also initiating a new movement somewhat comparable to that led by Nyrop in Denmark (see Chapter [24]).
The modes of Second Empire Paris left rather more mark on Holland than did those of the First Empire, particularly in the work of Cornelis Outshoorn (1810-75), whose iron-and-glass Paleis voor Volksvlijt in Amsterdam of the late fifties has been mentioned earlier. That is long gone, but the related Galerij, a U-shaped range of mansarded blocks linked by a sort of veranda of cast iron, till lately bounded the south of the Frederiksplein. His enormous Amstel Hotel, near by on the farther side of the Amstel, was built in 1863-7. At Scheveningen the Oranje Hotel (1872-3), also by him, was one of several typical resort establishments there of an international Second Empire order, as is also his hotel at Berg-en-Dal near Nijmegen (1867-9). Fairly generally high mansards rose in the sixties and seventies over the narrow house-fronts in the new quarters of Dutch cities. However, the opposing Neo-Gothic is more significant historically in Holland, and the secular work of Cuijpers as well as his churches, although rather like Clason’s, is better considered in that connexion (see Chapter [11]). As in the Scandinavian countries, the nineties saw new beginnings in Holland, in this case with the appearance of Berlage and Kromhout (see Chapter [20]).
The principal Anglo-American developments in the second half of the century were in the specialized fields of domestic and commercial building (see Chapters [14] and [15]). England, moreover, had from 1850 to the early seventies a lively stylistic development of her own, the High Victorian Gothic, rather different from the later Neo-Gothic of the Continent, which was also very influential in the Dominions and in the United States (see Chapters [10] and [11]). Nevertheless, the international Second Empire mode flourished on both sides of the Atlantic among Anglo-Saxons to a greater extent, perhaps, than anywhere in Europe. It is not, of course, possible to subsume all non-Gothic work of these decades in England under the Second Empire rubric any more than on the Continent. Yet, with certain notable exceptions, the most vigorous and conspicuous buildings of a generically Renaissance character were clearly inspired by Paris, and often specifically by the New Louvre, as Prosper Mérimée noted and wrote to Viollet-le-Duc while on a visit to London in the mid sixties.
The most considerable English public monument built just after the mid century, the Leeds Town Hall of 1855-9, is by Cuthbert Brodrick (Plate [78A]). That Brodrick was an architect markedly French in his leanings has already been noted in describing his Leeds Corn Exchange, which is later in date but earlier in style than his Town Hall (see Chapter 4). But this major early work, for which Brodrick won the commission in a competition in 1853, is not easily pigeon-holed stylistically. The great hall inside derives quite directly from Elmes’s in Liverpool, designed almost a quarter of a century earlier, though not opened until 1856. The exterior recalls in its grandiose scale the English Baroque of Vanbrugh more than it does anything that had even been projected since the megalomaniac French projects of the 1790s. The Leeds Town Hall is certainly no longer Romantic Classical, no longer Early Victorian; yet except for the rather clumsy originality of some of the detail and the varied outline of the tower—a late emendation of the original project of 1853—it is hard to say how or why it is so definitely High Victorian, and rather a masterpiece of the High Victorian at that. Wallot in Berlin in the eighties approached Brodrick’s mode of design in the Reichstag but had little of his command of scale or his almost Romantic Classical control of mass.
When Brodrick designed his town hall very little was known in England of Visconti’s project of 1852 for the New Louvre, and Lefuel had not yet begun to elaborate the design. So vigorously individual an architect as Brodrick was hardly likely, moreover, to find inspiration in the Hope house of Dusillion or the Hardwicks’ Great Western Hotel. But the wave of Second Empire influence arrived in England well before the Leeds Town Hall was finished. When the English swarmed to Paris to visit the International Exhibition of 1855 the character of the New Louvre became generally known to architects and to the interested public. The Crimean War in the mid fifties served, moreover, to bring English and French officialdom into close contact. To English ministers and civil servants, even more than to architects and ordinary citizens, the existing governmental accommodations in Whitehall contrasted most unfavourably with those Napoleon III was providing in the New Louvre. When a competition was held in 1856-7 for a new Foreign Office and a new War Office to be built in Whitehall, it is not surprising that most of those entrants who were not convinced Gothicists should have modelled their projects more or less on the work of Visconti and Lefuel.