Irish Arts Review

A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects by Howard ColvinReview by: Ann Martha RowanIrish Arts Review Yearbook, Vol. 13 (1997), pp. 201-202Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20492959 .

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BOOK REVI'EWS

these orderly configurations. Mr Somerville-Large also insists on the bone of ennui as a link in his chain of

reasoning about the idiosyncrasies of Ireland. The unique awfulness of the

weather, indigence, indigenes and isola tion disturbed minds. Dislocation then expressed itself through drinking, vio lence, melancholy, building mania, extravagance or flight. Ennui was a com

plaint which beset many in the country

houses of eighteenth- and nineteenth century Europe. No Irish Werthers or

Onegins are paraded, but the appear

ance of the torments of boredom, no less

than the arrival of other fashionable

crazes like separate libraries, dining

rooms and baths, oriental porcelain, engraved prints and cream-coloured faience, told of the island's thorough

assimilation to European ways.

Few readers of this attractive compila

tion will regret that the circumstances

and tastes of the Boyles, Conollys,

Edgeworths, Frenches, Fitzgeralds, Percevals and Warings are not minutely

reconstructed. Fewer still would ask that these local arbiters of Irish taste be com

pared with the Mansells and

Mackworths in South Wales, Elizabeth Shackleton of Alkincoats, let alone the

Montesquious, Saint-Amans, de Boyers and Schombergs in France or the old

and new inhabitants of the latifundia of

central and eastern Europe. Such com

parisons might, nevertheless, confirm favourite hunches that the structures and atmospheres of Irish life closely

resembled those in Hungary and Russia.

If, then, it is premature to see Mr

Somerville-Large's forebears, the Townshends, Flemings and Hulls of Leamcon, as the bocskoros or occasioned

nobility of West Cork, the revived inter

est in aristocracies and material life must

mean that this study will be superseded.

Until then, however, it serves excellently

to banish any gloom induced by sodden

Irish afternoons, although it may induce

Khjalatnost, lolling about in dressing gowns, to reli'sh it.

TOBY BARNARD is Keeper at Hertford College, Oxford.

A Biographical Dictionary of British

...............................................................................

BY HOWARD COLVIN ...............................................................................

Yale University Press (3rd ed.) 1995. ?50

Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. ?50

1264pp. 0-300-06091-2 ...............................................................................

Ann Martha Rowan

THREE MEN - Nikolaus Pevsner, John

Summerson, and Howard Colvin - could

be said to be the founding fathers of

British architectural history as it has

developed since the Second World War. For people interested in buildings, the names of Pevsner and Colvin have

become synonyms for the most ambitious and long-term projects of each: 'Pevsner'

is shorthand for the Buildings of England architectural guides, and 'Colvin' for the

most important single work to be pub

lished in the field, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, now re

issued in its third edition. Pevsner, Summerson and Colvin all

came to British architectural history by

different routes. Pevsner was a German

educated academic art historian,

Summerson an architect, and Colvin a

mediaeval historian. In Colvin's case the

idea of the Dictionary took shape during

the War, when he was still in his twen

ties and serving in the Royal Air Force.

While he was stationed in the south

west of England, he used to visit the

local churches during his off-duty hours. As an historian trained to justify asser

tion with proof, he was dismayed by the

lack of sound information about the

buildings he was looking at. Some of the

churches proudly displayed 'certificates' supplied by Albert Richardson, then Professor of Architecture at London University, who airily attributed them -

wholly or in part - to various well

known architects, without providing any good reasons for doing so. Colvin deter

mined, in his own words, 'to clear away

the undergrowth of irresponsible attribu

tion that impeded British architectural

scholarship earlier in this century' by

establishing reliable lists of the works of

the better-known architects, and at the

same time rescuing from oblivion the

thousands of obscurer figures who were

largely responsible for the appearance of the built fabric of post-mediaeval Britain.

Yet it would be wrong to think that

Colvin's document-based approach is drily academic; he has visited vast num

bers of the buildings he writes about, and

has the visual discrimination to assess

the quality of the architects who were

responsible for them as well as the sym

pathy to bring his subjects sometimes touchingly to life. His skill in weaving a

collection of loose facts into a concise

and elegant biographical entry makes

browsing in the Dictionary as agreeable as

mining it for information is rewarding. In a lucid introductory essay on the prac

tice of architecture between 1600 and

1800, he describes the displacement of the craftsman-architect, either a mason

or a carpenter, first by the gentleman

architect, familiar with the works of the

best foreign masters, and then by the

professional architect, who was eventu ally required to repudiate 'any interest or

participation in any Trade or Contract

connected with Building'. The first edition of the Dictionary

which was published in 1954 was 821

pages long; this third edition runs to

1,264 pages in a smaller typeface, and

has more or less reached the limit for a

single volume which can be easily han

dled. Naturally in a work of this kind

boundaries have to be set. Colvin's termi

nus ante quem of 1840 roughly corre

sponds with the foundation of the

Institute of British Architects in 1835 and with the accession of Queen

Victoria two years later, events which

heralded a new era for the profession

and for the country. Unfortunately for

Irish architectural historians, Colvin also decided from the beginning to omit Irish

and British architects who are recorded

as operating exclusively - or virtually

exclusively - in an Irish context.

Nevertheless, from an Irish viewpoint, the Dictionary is important in that it pro

vides information about the Irish works

of many established British architects,

the most significant of whom are proba

bly Edward Lovett Pearce, William

Chambers and James Gandon.

Knighted in 1995, Sir Howard, who is

2 0 1

I R i S vi A ii r s 11 i. v i i. w

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BOOK REVIEWS

now seventy-nine, is not contemplating a fourth edition of the Dictionary; for the

present new information will be pub lished in Architectural History, the jour

nal of the Society of Architectural

Historians of Great Britain. Researchers who come across information about the Irish work of British architects which they feel should be included in these

appendices should send it to Andor

Gomme, Barleybat Hall, Church Lawton, Stoke-on-Trent ST7 3DG.

ANN MARTHA ROWAN is working on a data base of Irish architects 1720-1940 at the Irish Architectural Archive.

The Gate Lodges of Ulster. A Gazetteer. ................... ........ ..................................................

BY J A K DEAN ...............................................................................

Ulster Architectural Heritage Society, 185 Stranmillis

Road, Belfast, 1994. ?13.95(p/b).

168pp. 508 b&w ills.. 0-900-457-46-5 ...............................................................................

Patrick Guinness

THIS TIMELY book lists the lodges in all

nine counties, with a paragraph or two

on each and the original designs or small

photographs where possible. The result is an illustrated list, but the beauty of this

book is the enormous variety of design,

and it will be of interest to tourists.

Maybe now our prolific bungalow archi

tects can show their clients what can be

done as an alternative to today's

Hacienda styles. It is tempting to stereotype the lodge

keeper, loyally tugging his forelock and hauling at the gates for Lord X and Lady Y. Part of his job was to keep trespassers

and pedlars out, but he was also there to

keep bolting horses or straying cattle in.

Often the lodgekeeper was a retired and

trusted servant who had nowhere else to

live, and opening the gates at all hours

was infinitely preferable to a place in the

local workhouse. The worry was that he

might take to drinking and he was

encouraged to garden and keep the gates

tidy. By 1800 the keeper himself was

occasionally enhanced with a uniform.

For visitors, the gate lodge was often a

foretaste of the style of the main house, or different by way of contrast.

Sometimes a grandiose pair of gates

designed to impress the world led to a

relatively humble abode. One landlord built such an entrance and was nick

named 'Smyth with the gates'. This so

annoyed him that he took them down,

only to be renamed, to his much greater

annoyance, 'Smyth without the gates'. Occasionally a lodge was across the road

from the gates, to suggest to visitors that

their hosts owned land on both sides of

the road.

Mr Dean points out in the European

context that gate lodges were relatively

more common in the British Isles. Perhaps this was because the aristocracy

here and in England spent more time on

their lands, and visiting each others'

estates, while the continental nobility were usually obliged to be seen at Court.

The Ulster lodges start as defensive

outworks built at the time of the

Plantation, such as at Castlecaulfield, ranging through the classical simplicity of the eighteenth century to the more

ornate structures of the nineteenth cen

tury inspired by the Romantic move

ment. Battlemented, thatched or slated, their form could be cubic, round, octago

nal and even ovoid. This is an excellent

book for understanding design and

history on the human scale.

PATRICK GUINNESS is a member of the Irish Georgian Society.

Irish Art Mastep eces BY CATHERINE MARSHALL ...............................................................................

Hugh Lauter Levin Associates Inc. 1995

(Distributed in Ireland by Gazelle Book Services Ltd,

England). $35(h/b)

120pp. 14 blw ills 52 ills. 52 col. 0 88363 295 0 ...............................................................................

James White

THIS BOOK opens with an introduction containing fifteen black and white repro

ductions which illustrate the author's extremely fair and competent explana

tion of Ireland's pre-history and the

political situation following various invaders and colonisers such as the

Vikings and Normans and the religious episodes from the Reformation onwards. I greatly admire the clear and concise

manner in which she covers so long a

period of time and her success in outlin

ing the fact that from the twelfth to the

seventeenth century there was virtually no Irish painting and very rare instances

of any other examples of art work.

The first Masterpieces cover thirteen objects, both pre-historic and Celtic and onwards up to the Romanesque portal of

Clonfert, each brilliantly illustrated in colour. This, of course, was the greatest

period of Irish art when it can well be

claimed to be outstanding in the fullest

international sense. However, the impulse which came from the early

abstract ornament and was then welded

into the monastic spirit has to be seen as

too far back to be a continuing influence

on the art of the seventeenth, eigh

teenth and nineteenth centuries which are illustrated by the following eighteen reproductions; these cover the emer gence of painters of purely English ori

gins like John Michael Wright, who recorded the likenesses of some of the

contestants of the Battle of the Boyne of

1690. Malahide Castle was set up as a

historic monument to that occasion in

1976 and it contains a portrait by the

same artist of two of the daughters of

the Talbot family who had gathered

King James's supporters there on that

famous occasion. Catherine Marshall has chosen fine

examples of the eighteenth and nine

teenth centuries' Irish painters who were

absorbed into the prevailing European

styles, Classical, Romantic and Barbizon.

This whole age was born out of the new

era of art teaching which began in

Ireland with the Dublin Society (subse

quently the Royal Dublin Society) in

1739. It was one of these first pupils,

Susannah Drury, who won the first pre

mium for art with her view of The

Giant's Causeway in that year, a fine ver

sion of which is reproduced here.

From that time forward the choice of

works to represent Irish art until the end

of the 1980s follows fine examples of fig ure and landscape painting. However

the author's selection to represent the

extreme modernism of the 1990s period will no doubt earn her strong criticism. I

have to confess, however, that no

202

IR I S II A R s R 1. X i 1. H

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