It would be inappropriate in this chapter to carry the story of Victorian Gothic much further. Scott and Street died in 1878 and 1881 respectively, though Butterfield and Bodley outlived Pearson. Butterfield seems to have frozen for life in the mode of his early maturity, and as a result produced ever feebler work after the mid sixties; Pearson was able to maintain a leading position with a younger generation grown chaster and more archaeological in its standards without forsaking his pursuit of those more abstractly architectonic values which give distinction to his earlier work. It was above all Bodley, however, with his Late Decorated verging on Perpendicular, who set the pace in Anglican church-architecture from this time forward. His personal style, still tentative at All Saints, Cambridge, in the mid sixties, was mature by the time he built St Augustine’s at Pendlebury in Lancashire in 1870-4. Crisp and almost mechanical in its detailing, this tall rectangular mass, buttressed by an internal arcade, is impressive both inside and out (Plate [92B]), yet it wholly abjures most of the qualities that had for two decades given special vitality to English Neo-Gothic.
With various modulations what might, rather ambiguously, be called ‘Bodleian Gothic’ remained the favourite of Anglicans in and out of England well into the twentieth century. The continuing admiration for the work of Sir Ninian Comper (1864-1960) in certain milieus suggests that it has not even yet been finally superseded; but much of Comper’s large-scale work dates from before Bodley’s death in 1907. For example, his principal London church, St Cyprian’s in Glentworth Street, was built in 1903. This crisp and clean example of revived Late Gothic, with its elegant gilt font-cover and screen, may wind up this account more appropriately than the vast unfinished cathedral at Liverpool begun by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (1880-1960), a grandson of the first G. G. Scott, in 1903. But neither is Victorian Gothic; both are rather manifestations of one aspect of twentieth-century ‘traditionalism’ (see Chapter [24]).
CHAPTER 11
LATER NEO-GOTHIC OUTSIDE ENGLAND
The High Victorian Gothic produced in the United States no such roster of distinguished—or at least prominent and highly characteristic—monuments as in Britain. The period of its florescence was much briefer, and few assured and sophisticated talents came to the fore. If, in the case of Richardson, one such did appear, his maturity came only in the mid seventies, when the High Victorian Gothic was all but over. Why the period was so much shorter in the United States, in effect only the decade 1865-75, is not altogether clear. One reason, undoubtedly, is that the speed of transmission of new architectural ideas from England to America had increased so much by the seventies that the influence of the later English mode which succeeded the High Victorian Gothic around 1870 reached America very promptly indeed (see Chapters [13] and [15]). Another quite different reason is that a wave of nationalism in America, parallel to those current in North European countries at the time, encouraged from the mid seventies developments that were more autochthonous. Leadership in commercial and in domestic architecture crossed the Atlantic almost precisely at the moment when, in 1876, the centenary[[235]] of American political independence was being celebrated.
The phenomenal success in the United States of Ruskin’s treatises, The Seven Lamps of Architecture of 1849 and The Stones of Venice[[236]] of 1851-3, should be emphasized; from 1855 Street’s Brick and Marble Architecture was also available. Yet, despite the warm reception of such relevant writings, few reflections of the High Victorian Gothic can be discerned in American production before 1860. The first is probably the Nott Memorial Library[[237]] at Union College, Schenectady, N.Y., designed by Edward T. Potter (1831-1904) in 1856 and built in 1858-76. Here the banded arches are pointed and the plan is circular, perhaps in emulation of the Pisa Baptistery to which Ruskin had called attention, but more probably in deference to Ramée’s general plan for the college (see Chapter [1]).
The years immediately following the Panic of 1857 and, quite understandably, the Civil War years 1861-5 were relatively unproductive of new buildings, as has already been noted. An edifice far more overtly Ruskinian than Potter’s Library was the National Academy in New York, built by Peter B. Wight (1838-1925) in 1863-5, although apparently first designed as early as 1861. Its Venetian Gothic mode, with pointed arches boldly banded and walls diapered in coloured stones, was still the subject of considerable contemporary controversy as it would hardly have been in England by this date.
Potter and Wight were both young men. Established Gothic Revivalists in America did not swing over as rapidly as in England from the Early Victorian to the High. Upjohn, Potter’s master, was no Butterfield; Renwick when designing St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York in 1859 followed contemporary Continental rather than English models, as has been noted, presumably because his clients were Catholics.
At best the sort of High Church Anglican patronage which sponsored Butterfield’s and Street’s innovations in England was relatively much less important in the United States—or Canada and Australia, for that matter. Enthusiasm for the High Victorian Gothic, although widespread in the later sixties and early seventies, was rarely exclusive as is evidenced by the disparate interests and activities of the members of the prominent and successful firm of Ware & Van Brunt. It has already been noted that when William Robert Ware founded in 1865 the first American architectural school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, he based its instruction on that of the Paris École des Beaux-Arts.[[238]] His partner Henry Van Brunt (1832-1903) was one of the first to follow Richardson’s lead away from the High Victorian Gothic in the seventies. So little were either of them dyed-in-the-wool Gothicists in these decades.[[239]]
However, Ware & Van Brunt designed and built in Cambridge, Mass., one of the largest and most conspicuous of mature High Victorian Gothic edifices in America, Memorial Hall[[240]] at Harvard College, first projected in the late sixties and erected in 1870-8. This somewhat cathedral-like edifice has walls of red brick liberally lashed with black and a massive central tower now denuded by fire of its high roof (Plate [95A]). The manner is more than a little Butterfieldian, but the quality is not even up to G. G. Scott.