John Stewart

Blog 86

Fortingall

I always enjoy returning to Fortingall, the model village which was created by shipping magnate Sir Donald Currie and architect James MacLaren. Currie made his fortune from the Union Castle Line which plied the route between Southampton and Cape Town in South Africa and he bought the Garth Estate in Glen Lyon in Scotland in the 1880’s, employing MacLaren to undertake works to the main house in 1889 and to create a series of workers cottages, a village hall and a small hotel as well as restoring the local church.

The hotel is a delightful essay in the Scottish vernacular and interestingly predates all of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s work, which was much influenced by it. The combination of painted roughcast walls, sandstone dressings and carved art nouveau lettering, all of which is normally assigned to Mackintosh, are all in evidence here and the hotel, along with its elegant interior spaces remains in use today.

The cottages continue the language on a domestic scale and were all originally thatched, though now several are tiled, following fires in the 60’s and 70’s. Like the hotel, the are beautifully maintained and still form the heart of the village. Adjacent to the hotel is the village church which was all but ruined when the restoration was undertaken and in whose churchyard stands the 5000 year old yew tree, for which Fortingall is famous. The interior is utterly restrained and, like the glen itself, a place of perfect tranquility.

James MacLaren rarely gets the credit he deserves for his pioneering work with his dramatic Stirling High School being one of the finest and most influential late 19^th century Scottish buildings. He established his practice in London where he built a number of townhouses and attracted several outstanding pupils including Robert Lorimer, before his tragically early death from tuberculosis at the age of 37 in 1890, while work in Fortingall was underway, with the hotel and church restoration being completed by Dunn and Watson architects, two of his former pupils.

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Blog 85

100 years ago, 1924 saw the completion of the Copenhagen Police Headquarters building. This proved to be Hack Kampmann’s (1856-1920) swansong and a fitting end to the career of the most prolific Danish architect of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Like the best Nordic Classical work, Kampmann’s Politigården is designed to evoke a strong emotional response from its visitors and users. It’s grey-rendered exterior suggests the dull administration of the law, (thus lowering our expectations) and while a recessed arched portico responds to the modest square in front of it, there is not even an obvious entrance. From within the portico, two modest flights of stairs on either side lead visitors up to the first floor, where they are suddenly confronted by one of the most stunning architectural spaces of the twentieth century.

The courtyard represents ‘Law and Order’ in all its majesty, raised above the everyday level of life on the streets outside and bringing dignity to its pursuit. A further courtyard (reached by a low unadorned shaft through the ring of offices) is an equally dramatic memorial to police officers killed in the line of duty, enclosed by two rows of three-storey high Corinthian columns and with Einar Utzon-Frank’s sculpture The Snake Killer as its focus. The interiors, completed after Kampmann’s death by his assistants, are exquisite, complete with the original fittings and much of the furniture, and are beautifully maintained.

The plan of the building is one of the most elegant that you are ever likely to come across (despite the irregular shape of the site), and it offers the great central drum of the main courtyard as a mighty wheel which drives the cogs of the staircases which in turn distribute the radial energy created, throughout the corridors and offices. It is a work of art in itself.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of all about this building, however, is that it has been in continuous use since 1924 and (as recently seen on ‘The Bridge’ and ‘The Killing’) and still functions effectively as the city’s police headquarters. It makes you wonder just how many other beautiful Victorian and Edwardian schools, town halls, police stations and offices could have been saved from destruction, if their users, advisers and architects, had been a little more flexible and a little bit less dogmatic.

If you want to read more about Hack Kampmann and the Copenhagen Police Headquarters then see my book Nordic Classicism – Scandinavian Architecture 1910-1930 and if you don’t want to miss out on any further blogs, please follow me on johngooldstewart.com

Blog 84

The Union Bank of Scotland 1924-27

100 years ago, in 1924, Norman Hird, the dynamic new 39 year-old General Manager of the Union Bank of Scotland announced an architectural competition for the design of their new headquarters building in Glasgow. The winning entry was that of James Miller who, by the 1920’s, had succeeded JJ Burnet as Scotland’s leading and most successful architect.

Like much of Miller’s work in the 20’s and 30’s it drew on US precedents, in this case McKim, Mead and White’s National City Bank in New York, and his beautifully-presented proposal responded superbly to Hird’s brief with a grand double-height banking hall below six floors of offices which both served the bank’s needs and offered rental office accommodation to help repay their investment. The first floor of offices is actually set within the giant Ionic colonnade and the final floor provides a storey-high frieze below the great overhanging cornice which tops the composition.

The details reinforce the classical illusions of eternity with a rather Greek bronze grid behind the colonnade and the banking hall itself is graced with full-height marble Doric columns with foret de brousse marble lining the walls. It was exactly the Temple of Finance which Hird had sought and provided a model for Miller’s future banks in the city, including his exquisite Commercial Bank of Scotland on Bothwell Street.

Miller’s Commercial Bank of Scotland of 1934-5

You can read more about James Miller and his architecture in ‘The Life and Works of Glasgow Architects James Miller and John James Burnet’ and if you don’t want to miss out on further blogs, please follow me on johngooldstewart.com.

Blog 83

The New Sculpture

One of the joys of researching my latest book on Architectural sculpture was discovering more about the late nineteenth century New Sculpture Movement. Inspired by the works of Alfred Stevens, Aime-Jules Dalou and Frederick Leighton a new generation of sculptors including George Frampton, Alfred Gilbert and Harry Bates brought a new vitality and emotional impact to their art. Marble was generally abandoned in favour of bronze and the cire-perdue method of casting offered a new richness of texture to their work.

Unusually for fine art sculptors, architectural sculpture was one of their favoured mediums (along with traditional statuary, relief panels and medals) and the new style successfully translated into sandstone or Portland stone with their allegorical works fully integrated within the overall architectural composition. Fortunately, a huge number of examples of their work survive and are thus on permanent public display. These range from Frampton’s magisterial bronze Saint Mungo at the entrance to the Glasgow Art Galleries and Museum to Harry Bates haunting evocations of War and Peace on the Old War Office in London and Henry Poole’s writhing Mermaids and Mermen on Cardiff City Hall.

Though the movement reached its peak prior to the First World War, its influence on the extraordinary quantity and quality of the sculpture which commemorated the terrible loss of life was much in evidence in the work of the next generation of sculptors who were commissioned to provide memorials. Several of these, including perhaps the most famous British war memorial sculptor, Charles Sargeant Jagger, had also served at the front and thus brought a searing new realism to their commemorative sculpture. And so, from the horrors of war, arose one of the greatest collections of public sculptures which remain as powerful today as when they were when first unveiled a century ago.

Charles Sargeant Jagger’s ‘Great Western Railway War Memorial’

My book on British Architectural Sculpture will be published by Lund Humphries in April 2024 and if you don’t want to miss out on further blogs, please follow me at johngooldstewart.com.

Blog 82

There are many contemporary landscape architects whom I admire including Christopher Bradley-Hole, Fernando Caruncho and Martha Schwartz amongst others, but for me personally, there’s one whose work just strikes a particular chord with me – the Italian Luciano Giubbilei. Born in Siena, he moved to London to study landscape architecture at the Inchbald School of Design and it was in London that he later founded and still maintains his practice which now works on commissions around the globe; and it was in London, with a series of intimate North London gardens, that he first burst on to the scene.

They were characterised by the utmost restraint, a very limited palette and yet a subtle and often complex layering of space which transformed what were often quite limited spaces into oases of calm and elegance in the midst of the city. At Pelham Crescent the planting is limited to hedges and a few (sculptural) multi-stemmed trees but the sound of the water and the crunch of the gravel awake the senses on the short walk to the warmth and enclosure of the outdoor room.

When the owners moved to a larger house in Addison Road, they employed him again to create something on a considerably larger scale which included the addition of sculpture for the first time and this was followed by a string of further city gardens for discerning (and suitably wealthy) clients. In 2009 he was invited to design a garden for the Chelsea Flower Show for the first time and, in deference to the show’s heritage, included a quite remarkable, richly planted flower border of blood-red paeonies, salvia and blackcurrant irises amidst his layers of hedging.

At first, his work seemed uniquely restrained but I soon began to understand that it drew deeply on the Italian tradition of landscaped gardens. The formal hedges, topiary, paving and gravel paths and the introduction of the sound and cooling effect of water were well established within the Renaissance gardens such as the Giardino Giusti in Verona or the rather grander Boboli Gardens of the Medici’s in Florence, but Giubbilei’s gardens, far from attempting to reproduce the originals merely draw imaginatively on their themes and ideas.

Following his early successes, Giubbilei’s skills are now in demand internationally and his more recent projects offer further examples of his approach in various new settings and environments such as his olive grove in Morocco underplanted with grasses and his recent roof garden in Barcelona. Merrell have published two beautiful books on his work – ‘The Gardens of Luciano Giubbilei’ and ‘The Art of Making Gardens’ – both of which I can strongly recommend.

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Blog 81

British Architectural Sculpture 1851-1951

My latest book is a paean to the lost art of architectural sculpture in which architects and sculptors collaborated to produce the richly carved and beautifully decorated buildings that make up so much of our rich British architectural heritage.

Mermen and Mermaids on Cardiff City Hall by Henry Poole

When researching the Glasgow architects JJ Burnet and James Miller for my previous book on their lives and work, I began to understand for the first time just how their ornate stone buildings were produced and in particular how sculpture was incorporated within them and by whom. What I discovered was a complex process involving masons, stone carvers, architectural sculptors and occasionally fine art sculptors who worked in collaboration with architects to create complex detail and sculpture in stone, terracotta, faience and eventually concrete.

Keystone on Leeds City Hall by Catherine Mawer

Many of the sculptors involved built their career in sculpture from humble beginnings as stone masons’ apprentices, going on to establish their own studios as architectural sculptors and occasionally as fine art sculptors too – Albert Hodge, for example, born on the tiny Hebridean island of Islay, having first trained as an architect, went on to become one of the leading architectural sculptors of his day working for James Salmon, William Leiper and James Miller in Glasgow before going on to create sculpture on major buildings throughout England, Wales and Canada. Others trained as fine art sculptors in the studios of master sculptors such as Henry Charles Fehr who was an assistant to Thomas Brock and counted architectural sculpture as simply one of his creative outlets along with statuary, busts and medals while others still, such as the brilliant George Frampton who was one of the leaders of the late nineteenth century New Sculpture Movement, produced much of their finest work as architectural sculpture.

Truth and Justice by Alfred Drury on the Old War Office, London

Their extraordinary art relied on carving and casting masonry and with the emergence of Modernism in the 20^thcentury it was a practice which was doomed as building construction became simpler, materials and components mass-produced and ornament became both unaffordable and irrelevant within the new Functional style. My book traces the greatest period of British architectural sculpture during which the wealth of the British empire was celebrated in masonry, from the Great Exhibition of 1851 until the Festival of Britain in 1951, by which time this art form was little understood and rarely appreciated. The book is a tribute to these exceptional artists and to their work, much of which survives today, high above the streets of our towns and cities.

Ernest Gillick’s allegorical group on the National Provincial Bank in the City of London.

British Architectural Sculpture 1851-1951 will be published by Lund Humphries in May 2024.

Eric Gill’s (recently damaged) Prospero and Aerial on Broadcasting House.

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Blog 80

I finally made it to Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire, the country home of William Morris, a few weeks ago. Morris was one of the most culturally influential late Victorians, as a key member of the Arts and Crafts Movement, artist, poet, socialist activist and of course as the founder of Morris and Co. whose textile designs are still in production today. He had earlier commissioned Philip Webb to design the Red House for him, which is widely recognised as the first Arts and Crafts house.

He first leased Kelmscott Manor in 1871 as a country retreat for him and his wife Jane Burden, perhaps the most painted muse of the Pre-Raphaelites. Jane had been discovered in Oxford by Dante Gabriel Rosetti and sat as a model for many of his most famous paintings including Queen Guinevere and Prosperine with them later becoming lovers after her marriage to Morris. For Morris, Kelmscott offered an idealised vision of domestic life, far from the industrial towns and cities of Victorian Britain and he divided his time between Kelmscott and London, where his textile business was based, for the remainder of his life (with Kelmscott Manor appearing on the frontispiece of his utopian manifesto News from Nowhere).

The house and garden are delightful and, as one would expect, utterly restrained, with Morris’s textiles hung in several rooms and numerous paintings and tapestries by both Morris and Jane throughout the house.

What I hadn’t appreciated was that in addition to the Manor, Morris had also commissioned several buildings within the village including Manor Cottages and the Morris Memorial Village Hall by Ernest Gimson who had also moved to the Cotswolds ‘to be nearer to nature’ and the Memorial Cottages by Philip Webb, with whom Morris had been collaborating since the design of the Red House in 1859, with Webb also designing the Morris family gravestone in the village churchyard where Morris and Jane were both buried. All in all, Kelmscott certainly offers a seductive vision of Morris’s ideal of English village life.

A relief of Morris at Kelmscott on Phillip Webb’s Memorial Cottages

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Blog 79

I have finally completed my book on British Architectural Sculpture and it will be published later this year by Lund Humphries. Its been another fascinating piece of research into what has become almost a lost art form which has taken me across the UK in search of the best examples.

The book spans the period from the Great Exhibition in 1851 to the Festival of Britain in 1951 and charts the contributions of the many master masons, stone carvers and sculptors who contributed sculpture to the architecture of this period. It includes the work of men like John Thomas (1813-62) who was orphaned as a child, apprenticed as a stone mason and eventually progressed to a position of overseeing the creation of all the architectural sculpture on the new Palace of Westminster for the architect Charles Barry; Albert Hodge (1875-1917), born on the Hebridean island of Islay who became one of the most sought-after architectural sculptors of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, working for architects John James Burnet, James Miller, Edwin Cooper and Aston Webb and Catherine Mawer (1803-77) one of the few 19^th century female architectural sculptors who carved much of the detail on Leeds City Hall and successfully continued her husband’s monumental sculpture, stone masonry and wood-carving business after his death, eventually passing it on to their sons.

By the end of the 19^th century (largely as a result of the formation of The Art Workers Guild), many of the finest sculptors were contributing architectural sculpture too, and the contributions of George Frampton (1860-1928), in sculpting the great bronze ‘St Mungo’ and overseeing the entire programme of sculpture on the Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum, Alfred Drury (1856-1944), in providing the haunting images representing ‘War’ on the Old War Office in Whitehall and Gilbert Bayes , whose ‘Queen of Time’ still looks down on Selfridges main entrance on Oxford Street, represent some of the best British sculpture of the period.

Gilbert Bayes on the Commercial Bank of Scotland

Firms like Farmer and Brindley in London, Robert Boulton in Birmingham and J+G Mossman in Glasgow produced everything from architectural sculpture to funerary monuments and public statues as well as forming long-term relationships with the architects whom they regularly worked with on buildings, with both George Gilbert Scott and Alfred Waterhouse favouring Farmer & Brindley, Edward Godwin – Richard Boulton and Alexander (Greek) Thomson – John Mossman. The quality of the best work of all these contributors is simply outstanding and fortunately, not only has the majority of it survived, but these extraordinary works of art are available free to anyone who just takes time to look up at them.

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Blog 78

Baron Marochetti

The Equestrian Monument of Emmanuel Philibert, in the Piazza San Carlo in Turin

Baron Pietro Carlo Giovanni Battista Marochetti (1805 – 1867) was an Italian-born French artist who settled in Britain in 1848, after which he established himself as the most successful and sought-after sculptor in the country. He completed numerous public sculptures, usually in the neo-classical style, plus reliefs, memorials and large equestrian monuments in bronze and marble eventually receiving several commissions from Queen Victoria herself.

The Equestrian Monument to Richard Coeur de Lion, in Old Palace Yard in London

One of the greatest artists of the Victorian age, his work was in demand right across Europe and he produced memorials throughout the British Empire including a Crimean War Memorial in Istanbul and a Memorial commemorating the Cawnpore Massacre in India. Perhaps his best-known works are the bronze lions in Trafalgar Square, on which he collaborated with the painter Edwin Landseer, and his magisterial equestrian statue of Richard the Lionheart, which is located in front of the Palace of Westminster in central London.

The Equestrian Monument to the Duke of Wellington, in Exchange Square in Glasgow

And then there’s his particularly fine equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington in Glasgow (the former City of Culture), which is usually crowned with a plastic traffic cone.

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Blog 77

Richard Norman Shaw

I’ve written before about the brilliant Scottish architect Richard Norman Shaw (1831-1912). He dominated his profession in Britain in the final decades of the nineteenth century, developing what became known as the ‘Queen Anne’ style with his early partner William Nesfield before going on to lead the classical revival that would dominate the Edwardian age. His works are well known but his quite extraordinary draughtsmanship, much less so.

Like most of his contemporaries, his architectural education included several sketching tours of Europe and it was the drawings from his travels, which were published as ‘Architectural Sketches from the Continent’ in 1858, which first attracted attention to his exceptional abilities. While described as sketches, these were actually beautifully rendered views such as the tinted lithograph of the Tiergarten Tower in Nuremberg, which he included in the cover to his book.

While working in the office of George Edmund Street (1824-88), one of the leaders of the Gothic Revival, he continued to travel and sketch and also produced his own modest designs which again generated further interest when exhibited at the annual ‘Architectural Exhibition’ and later at the Royal Academy. After 16 years of study, training and practical experience, Shaw established his practice with Nesfield in 1863 and soon began to attract substantial domestic commissions, all of which were presented in beautifully rendered perspectives.

His perspective of Adcote of 1876-81, which he himself regarded as his finest house, is typical of these drawings, which convey not only the three-dimensional form of his proposals in extraordinary detail, but equally a sense of the place which he was in the process of creating. This drawing continues to be displayed in the Diploma Gallery of the Royal Academy to this day.

His extraordinary range and skills were also often applied to interiors such as in the early design for his church in Bingley in Yorkshire of 1864. There can be few finer architectural perspectives ever produced. As his practice became more and more successful, sadly, the production of perspective drawings was passed to his pupils with both Mervyn Macartney and Archibald Christie working within Shaw’s established style and producing similar work of a very high standard. To produce drawings as fine as these would be remarkable (not least as they were drawn with a pen dipped in ink) but when they also portray highly innovative architecture of an exceptional standard, we get to something approaching genius.

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