Bentley’s tower has a similar silhouette, but is more boldly striated by broad bands of brick and stone. The detail, partly Byzantine, partly Early Renaissance despite his distinguished early career as a Late Victorian Gothic church architect, is, like Collcutt’s, rather underscaled. This goes still further to prove the extent to which this period in England saw all architecture, even that of cathedrals, in domestic terms. However, well before Bentley began his cathedral—it is not even yet completed as regards the internal decoration—Shaw had turned towards considerably more monumental forms at Scotland Yard, and even to quite academic design.
At Bryanston, a large country house in Dorset begun in 1889 for Lord Portman, Shaw modelled the main block on Sir Roger Pratt’s Coleshill House of the mid seventeenth century; the side wings here are quite Gibbsian. This is the earliest example of what the English call ‘Monumental Queen Anne’—to distinguish this sort of work henceforth from the freer and more vernacular Queen Anne of the seventies and eighties—and the Americans ‘Georgian Revival’. Two years later Shaw built Chesters in Northumberland. This mansion is equally academic, if less derivative from particular sources; but it is also highly original in plan and conception. The composition of the incurved façade planes, moreover, is as knowing and as ingenious in its formal way as anything he ever built in a more rambling vein.
Later in the nineties Shaw’s stylistic uncertainty—or, if one wishes to call it so, his versatility—was notably illustrated in two large commercial buildings built in Liverpool. The façade of Parr’s Bank in Castle Street, built in 1898 in collaboration with W. E. Willink (1856-1924) and P. C. Thicknesse (1860-1920), is of the suavest academic order. Its proportions are surer than in any of his other works except Chesters, and yet he striated its light-coloured stonework with bands of green marble in a way few later architects working in this vein would ever have thought of doing. Two years later, in the offices that he built in collaboration with Doyle for Ismay, Imrie & Co., later the White Star Line—for whom he also designed the interiors of the liner Oceanic—he provided what was externally almost a copy of Scotland Yard, and yet inside he exposed the riveted metal structural members in a fashion at once frank and highly decorative.
If Shaw had had the opportunity to rebuild Nash’s Regent Street Quadrant completely according to the designs that he prepared in 1905 the loss of the original work might not be so serious. Approaching seventy-five, he turned here to a Piranesian Classicism. The colonnaded section finished in 1908, which forms the northern front of the Piccadilly Hotel, though flanked at both ends by an emasculated version of Shaw’s design carried out in 1923 by his disciple and biographer Sir Reginald Blomfield (1856-1942), rivals in boldness anything English architecture had produced since the days of Vanbrugh and Hawksmore. Even more spectacular, and also incomplete, since the gable at the east end was never built, is the Piccadilly façade of the hotel with its tremendous open colonnade raised high against the sky (Plate [107]). The Classical serenity of this feature is characteristically contrasted with the voluted silhouette of the tall gable over the projecting wing at the west end, and the exuberance of the whole puts most other Edwardian Neo-Baroque to shame.
To summarize Shaw’s achievement or even to epitomize his personal style is almost impossible. He was, for example, in no ordinary sense of the word merely an eclectic; yet his modes were very various, more various than those of almost any other nineteenth-century architect of equal rank. After his first borrowings from Nesfield, however, they were all his own—his own, at least, until hordes of other architects in England and America took them up, one or two at a time, often vulgarizing them beyond recognition. He was probably not the most talented English architect of his generation and certainly not the most original. How much he owed to Nesfield at the start it is impossible to estimate, even though at least two of the characteristic Shavian modes seem to have been originally of his invention—if not, indeed, of Devey’s!
Yet ironically Nesfield’s own later work appeared to contemporaries almost like an echo of Shaw’s if it was known at all. He never had any such success as did Shaw, and died relatively young in 1888. Godwin also was somehow never able, after 1870, to repeat the public triumphs that had been his in the competitions of the early sixties. In his later life he turned more and more to designing sets and costumes for the theatre and died in 1886, two years before Nesfield. Webb lived on till 1915, although he retired from practice in 1900; his spirit, moreover, lived on in a quite different way from Shaw’s. It was through emulation of the craftsman-like integrity of Webb’s work that the attitudes, rather than the forms, of Pugin’s earlier Gothic Revival were transmitted to the first modern architects quite as much as through study of the writings of his friend and close associate Morris.
CHAPTER 13
H. H. RICHARDSON AND McKIM, MEAD & WHITE
The story of Shaw’s career is a fascinating one, far more interesting in fact than the general history of English architecture in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It was a success-drama in four or five acts, of which the last was by no means the least brilliant. Richardson’s career was less eventful, even though, at its peak in the mid eighties, it was at least as successful as Shaw’s. It was also incomplete, since death brought his production to an end at that peak when he was only forty-eight. Yet Richardson’s achievement must be considered greater than Shaw’s, qualitatively if not quantitatively, because his work was better integrated and his development more intelligently directed. Moreover, his influence operated on two levels: on one it was as wide, if more evanescent, than Shaw’s—say, what Shaw’s might have been if he had died at the age of forty-eight, that is, in 1879—on another level it was more like that of Webb, affecting deeply several of the most creative American architects of the next two generations.
Henry Hobson Richardson was born in 1838 near New Orleans in Louisiana. Upon graduation from Harvard in 1858 Richardson, bilingual on account of his Louisiana birth, not unnaturally proceeded to Paris to the École des Beaux-Arts, entering there the atelier of L.-J. André (1819-90), a pupil of Lebas who had become a professor at the École in 1855. But after two years the outbreak of the Civil War in the United States cut off his remittances from home and he had to find work in order to maintain himself. His experience in the office of Théodore Labrouste, notably in working on the designs for the Asile d’Ivry outside Paris, was perhaps of more ultimate value to him than what he learned in André’s atelier and at the École. Several of his earliest works in America, designed immediately after his return from Paris in 1865, have been discussed already (see Chapter [11]). It was with the Brattle Square (now First Baptist) Church on Commonwealth Avenue at Clarendon Street in the new Back Bay residential district of Boston, the commission for which he won in a competition held in 1870, that his career seriously began. During the years that this was in construction, 1871-2, he had in his office a young assistant, Charles F. McKim (1847-1909), who had returned from Paris at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. It may well be that the forceful McKim helped Richardson to crystallize the divergent elements evident in his earlier work into a coherent personal style. The Brattle Square Church somewhat resembles in its round-arched medievalism such a Paris church of the sixties as Vaudremer’s Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge, which Richardson himself may have seen and admired in the early stages of its construction. But the squarish T-shaped plan, without aisles but with transepts, would have been as unusual in France at this period as in England. The material is the richly textured Roxbury Puddingstone rising in broad plain surfaces to the medium-pitched gables. The detail strikes a sort of balance between the French Romanesquoid and the English High Victorian Gothic, the forms being more French, the execution more English. The varied polychromy of the deep voussoirs of the arches is certainly English, but with a personal note in the great variety of the coloured banding. The corner placing of the tall tower, with its fine frieze by the French sculptor Bartholdi, is English in spirit, but its shape is rather more campanile-like than any English church tower had been since the forties.