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A Victorian Architectural Correspondence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Extract

The relationship between architect and patron is of crucial importance in determining the character of any building, and nowhere more than in a country house. Here the patron not only pays for a building; he also lives in it. He might well have decided views on what a country house ought to look like, views that could be influenced by scholarship, travel, a wish to emulate or surpass neighbours’ houses, family pride, or simply a vague sense of his position as a ‘natural leader of society’. Before the rise of the architectural profession in the eighteenth century, owners of country houses often acted as their own architects, usually working in collaboration with a mason or builder. By the mid-nineteenth century this practice had virtually died out. The owner now had to find some means of reconciling his ideas on the appearance and layout of his house with those of a man who possessed the prestige that attached to professional status, and, perhaps, the arrogance of the Romantic artist who saw the country-house commission as a means of self-expression. William Talman’s arguments with his clients in the late seventeenth century gave an inkling of the ‘vexations’ that might occur when professional architect and patron, each with ideas of his own, disagreed; while Vanburgh’s arguments with Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, over Blenheim reached well-known and well-documented levels of vituperation. Such conflicts were by no means isolated occurrences.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1979

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References

Notes

1 Wagner, A., English Genealogy (1972) 75 Google Scholar.

2 Bateman, J., Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland (4th edn. 1883), 406 Google Scholar.

3 Francis White & Co., History, Gazetteer’o’ Directory of Warwickshire (1850), 723. The earlier history of the house is discussed in Warwickshire History, i, no. 4 (1970), 3-10.

4 building News, XVI (1869), 158.

5 This paragraph is based on the article in D.N.B.

6 Warwick Record Office (W.R.O.), C.R. 229/119/1-4.

7 Obituary in Building News, li (1886), 604.

8 Eastlake, C. L., History of the Gothic Revival (1872), 305 Google Scholar.

9 Letter dated 26 January 1859. W.R.O., C.R. 229/91.

10 Eastlake, op. cit., 307.

11 Ruskin, J., Seven Lamps of Architecture (Everyman Edn), 213 Google Scholar.

12 This, and all the other letters quoted, are in W.R.O., C.R. 229/91. The letters are not individually numbered.