The originators of modern Queen Anne were men trained in the Gothic school, and their watchword was "true construction." This term seems to be the most elastic and enduring of all the "short and easily-applied rules" of the profession of architecture. It is, however, applied more exclusively to the works of revivalists, and is frequently used in advocacy of new methods and in condemnation of the old. The architects of the Victorian School had had it impressed upon their minds by Pugin, Eastlake, and others, that true construction did not exist after the Middle Ages,—the period of massive timber framing, heavy tables, mantel-trees, and settles, put together with wooden pins and disdaining all curves and wavy lines. For a time these professors of artistic truth were implicitly believed, and architects came to look upon stucco, plastering, glue, veneers, broken pediments, and applied ornamentation as monstrous emanations from diseased brains, bewildered and carried off their balance by the great upheaval of the Renaissance.
The rapidity with which a change of sentiment was achieved is one of the most remarkable phenomena in architectural history. The worshippers of "truth" and the rest of the "Seven Lamps," the plaster-ornament-breakers of 1860, became ten years later the loyal subjects of Queen Anne, accepting without question the tenets of Stuart and Revett, the Adams, and even of Nash and Wyatt, who carried the use of stucco and applied ornamentation to the extremity of extravagance.
In studying the constructive features of the Queen Anne renaissance, we find many examples of richly-ornamented façades, combined with affected picturesqueness and quaintness unthought of two hundred years ago. How are we to account for this change in favor of greater richness and profusion of detail in a professed revival of the pure and simple forms of the past, and for the well-established fact, easily recognized by the student of architecture, that the Queen Anne brick-work of to-day owes much of its effectiveness, constructively and æsthetically, to the teaching of an earlier school,—that of the Tudors?
Decorative brick-work, as we find it used in English architecture, is not simply the outgrowth of the Dutch school, introduced at the accession of William of Orange. For centuries it had been employed with success, particularly in Norfolk and other brick-districts. Under the Tudor sovereigns, moulded and carved brick-work attained a high standard of excellence. The buildings erected during this period were frequently enriched with delicately wrought string-moulds, gable-ends, and cornices, sharp in outline, crisp and spirited in detail. Even under the Stuarts, Inigo Jones and his great successor Wren executed some noble works in this material. Unfortunately for art, Parliament in 1625 established the rectangular dimensions of bricks, which thenceforward were moulded on one dreary model,—a block of clay nine by four by two and one-half inches. In 1784 Parliament again interfered, and levied heavy taxes upon all bricks modelled, whether such bricks were spoiled in the baking or not. This tax was in its action almost prohibitory of any attempt at establishing a higher grade of workmanship. In the long interval between 1625 and the repeal of the tax in 1850, workmen in clay forgot their cunning, and all desire for improvement in design had come to a stand-still.
The Victorian architects made strenuous efforts to reform so discreditable a state of things, and, after struggling against the ignorance of labor and the conservatism of brick-masters, attained their end, and when, in 1870, the School Board Act went into operation it found them ready, with well-trained mechanics at their command. In 1850 the revival and expansion of semi-classic architecture wrought in brick would have been impossible; in 1870 the building world was ripe for the change. The architects themselves, after receiving their early education under the leaders of the stucco and plaster school of the later Georgian reigns, had had their ideas purified and refined by the art-teachings of the Victorian Gothicists. The result was a spontaneous movement to develop a new system of construction, with lintelled openings and square fenestration,—Queen Anne modified and elevated by mediæval teachings and traditions. A traditional manner, but a sensible one; a sudden fashion, if you will; a craze, but a craze upon which the architects of the future will probably look back with satisfaction, as a bold and successful step toward the solution of the vexed problem of domestic architecture,—how to make every man's house his proper dwelling, how to combine Sir Henry Wotton's three conditions of the art of well building,—"Commodity, Firmness, and Delight."
Leaving England, with its highly-developed and well-understood systems of construction as they existed in the seventeenth century, let us turn to the colonial work of the early settlers of America, keeping in mind the difficulties which surrounded them, and which not only influenced, but determined by absolute necessities, many of the constructive peculiarities which we note in their domestic buildings.
In the English colonies of North America we find, between the first settlement and the opening of the Revolution, three distinct periods or types of domestic building following each other in regular and clearly-defined sequence, from rude and massive structures of stone and timber to carefully-constructed and artistically-designed mansions.
The first period of colonial architecture embraces the greater part of the seventeenth century. Numerous edifices of this period may still be seen in Providence and Newport, Rhode Island, as well as in the western portions of the State. In Newport County I may instance the Governor Henry Bull house, built in 1639, the Sueton Grant house, built about 1650, the Governor Coddington house, erected in 1647, and the "Captain Kid" house, so called, on Conanicut Island. These houses show all the peculiarities of the constructive science of their day, which aimed simply to attain solidity and protection from the elements. The chimneys and end-walls were generally built of stone, laid up as random rubble, with mortar composed of shell lime, sand, and gravel, and flakes of broken slate pounded fine. The sides of these buildings, and the ends above the line of roof-plate, were of frame construction, made of heavy oak timber, rudely squared, put together with treenails and boarded with oak, usually at an angle of forty-five degrees, thus making of every board a separate brace. This boarding was sometimes covered with coarse stucco, as on the Bull house, or with split shingles, as on the Governor Coddington house, put on with wrought nails.
"Whitehall," the home of Bishop Berkeley, and a group of old houses on Thames Street at Newport, may be said to represent the second period of our colonial architecture,—i.e., the first quarter of the eighteenth century. They are entirely of frame construction, covered over the boarding with thick clap-boards, with beaded edges, put on with wrought nails, and the roofs covered with split shingles of a better class than those previously used. In houses of this period brick began to take the place of stone for chimneys, and the gambrel roof—a form of construction whose history so far has eluded the researches of the student—seems to have originated in the colonies: it continued in favor for a hundred years or more, and gradually developed into a well-proportioned architectural structure, with richly-moulded cornice and well-designed dormers. It had many advantages: the framing was simple and strong, and the attic rooms possessed all the height and floor-space obtainable in the modern French roof, so called, while avoiding the disagreeable box-like appearance of the latter. The window-frames of these early eighteenth-century houses were made of plank, mortised and pinned together, the sills and caps being often moulded and a bead run around the inner edge of the frames. The sashes were heavy and glazed, with small squares of very inferior glass set in wide muntins.
In one of these old houses we find an attempt to modify the gambrel into the hipped roof, a type which became highly developed in the latter half of the eighteenth century. In the earlier examples this roof, instead of being truncated and hipped in all around, with a railing above the crown moulding, was simply hipped in on the lower part, being turned up at the ends, forming small gables. The dwellings of this class form a connecting-link between the second and third periods, which may be said to have commenced about 1730, when the growing commercial importance of the seaport towns and the rapid accumulation of wealth induced a more lavish and elegant style of living.