Chapter 10: )

If early illustrations of the Picturesque point of view and of the mature Gothic Revival are on the whole of minor interest in the English-speaking world outside Great Britain, that whole world from California to Tasmania was absorbing the propaganda of the English exponents of the Picturesque and the Gothic Revival. This had its effect in the succeeding period when the High Victorian Gothic of England was exploited to more considerable purpose than the Neo-Gothic of the Early Victorian period. By the time a great English critic came to the support of the Gothic Revival, John Ruskin (1819-1900), he had almost from the original publication of his _Seven Lamps of Architecture_ in 1849 more readers beyond the seas than at home.[137]

Neither the Picturesque nor the Gothic Revival has the same importance on the Continent of Europe as in English-speaking countries. The Picturesque point of view was carried abroad by the great British artistic invention of the eighteenth century, the English garden—_jardin anglais_, _englischer Garten_, _giardino inglese_, _jardin inglès_, etc., to muster the various well-established and revelatory foreign terms for the more or less naturalistic mode that succeeded the architecturally ordered French gardens of the Le Nôtre type. By 1800 the Picturesque was as familiar in theory as were the international tenets of Romantic Classicism. But for all the garden fabricks that were built in Europe in the English taste, the point of view tended to remain alien. Moreover, from the continuance of Orléans Cathedral[138] in Gothic, ordered as early as 1707 by Louis XIV though not finally finished until 1829, to Schinkel’s painted Gothic visions of the opening of the nineteenth century, there is no lack of evidence of Continental interest in Gothic forms. In France there was also a very considerable theoretical interest in Gothic methods of construction that can hardly be matched in eighteenth-century England (see Introduction). But there followed in the early decades of the nineteenth century no such effective crystallization of an earlier dilettante interest in the Gothic as in England, no popular fad for building fake castles, no flood of cheap Commissioners’ Churches.

Yet, in France as in England, a new and more serious phase of the Gothic Revival did open in the late thirties, stimulated by the ideals of Catholic Revival of a series of writers from Chateaubriand to Montalembert. No great Gothic public monument like the Houses of Parliament in London was initiated in these years in Paris—nor for that matter at any later date—but several churches designed around 1840 were at least intended to be as exemplary as Pugin’s; they were also considerably more ambitious in their size and their elaboration than most of those his Catholic clients and the Camdenians’ Anglican ones were sponsoring in England at this point.

A curious example of the change in taste is the Chapelle-Saint-Louis at Dreux.[139] The original chapel was built in 1816-22 by an architect named Cramail (or Cramailler) as a Classical rotunda to serve as the mausoleum of the Orléans family. In 1839 Louis Philippe ordered its remodelling and enlargement in Gothic style by P.-B. Lefranc (1795-1856), desiring thus to associate the Orleanist dynasty with the medieval glories of French royalty in a manner already fashionable[140] with intellectuals to the left and to the right, if not with many architects. The new exterior, completed in 1848 just as the Orléans rule came to an end, is in a very lacy and unplausible sort of Gothick, not without a certain still rather eighteenth-century Rococo charm but quite inharmonious with the Classical interior. Like another Royal mausoleum of these years, the Chapelle-Saint-Ferdinand in the Avenue Pershing in Neuilly, built in 1843 in memory of an Orléans prince who had been killed in an accident near its site, the Chapelle-Saint-Louis has stained glass windows designed in 1844 by no less an artist than Ingres. These are even less appropriate in association with Lefranc’s Gothic than with the Romanesquoid mode that the elderly Fontaine—who knew, like Talleyrand, how to maintain his position under several successive regimes—used for the Neuilly chapel. They are hardly superior in quality, moreover, to the glass, whether imported from Germany or produced locally, that was being used in the early forties in England for Neo-Gothic churches.

A more important Gothic project of this date than the Chapelle-Saint-Louis was that for the large new Paris church of Sainte-Clotilde prepared in 1840 by F.-C. Gau (1790-1853), German-born but a pupil of Lebas. Doubts as to the extensive use of iron proposed by Gau held up the initiation of the construction of Sainte-Clotilde until 1846, so that several provincial Neo-Gothic edifices of some consequence were executed first. These may be compared, but only to their disadvantage, with Pugin’s churches of around 1840 as regards their plausibility, their intrinsic architectonic qualities, and the elegance of their detail. However, several of them are larger and more ambitious—being Catholic churches in a Catholic country—than are even his various cathedrals.

In any case the character of real Gothic architecture in France, as in most other European countries, made unlikely a programme of revival based chiefly on parish churches in the way of Pugin’s. The Continental Middle Ages had most notably produced cathedrals, and it was for new churches of near-cathedral scale that the re-use of Gothic was likely to be proposed. Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, built by J.-E. Barthélémy (1799-1868) in 1840-7 on the heights of Ste Cathérine above Rouen, opens the serious phase of the Revival in France. It has a superb site and is best appreciated from a considerable distance, but the silhouette is not happy and the execution is rather hard and cold. Saint-Nicholas at Nantes was begun in 1839 just before the Rouen church by L.-A. Piel (1808-41), a confused Romantic character who died a monk, and taken over in 1843 by J.-B.-A. Lassus (1807-57), a pupil of Lebas and Henri Labrouste. It is very hard to accept this church as even in part the production of Lassus, the erudite archaeologist who brought out in 1842 the first volume of a major monograph on Chartres Cathedral and who undertook in 1845, together with the better-known E.-E. Viollet-le-Duc (1814-79), the restoration of Notre-Dame in Paris after sharing with Duban the responsibility for restoring the Sainte-Chapelle. Rather more plausible—at least in the sense that it merges fairly successfully with the original fourteenth-century nave to which it is attached—is the façade of Saint-Ouen at Rouen built in 1845-51 by H.-C.-M. Grégoire (1791-1854), a pupil of Percier.

Sainte-Clotilde was finally begun in 1846, as has been noted, and completed after Gau’s death by Ballu in 1857 (Plate 55B). This ambitious urban church of cathedral scale lacks almost as completely as those just mentioned the personal qualities of design and the integrity of revived medieval craftsmanship that give character, if not always distinction, to the churches of Pugin, Carpenter, and other leading English Gothic Revivalists of the forties. Nor does it have the grandeur of proportion of Scott’s Nikolaikirche in Hamburg, to which it is more comparable in size and pretension (Plate 52B). The style is Rayonnant, or French fourteenth-century, and the material good freestone, but deadly mechanical and quite characterless in the detailing. The parts seem somehow too large for the whole. Ballu’s west towers, for example, are excessively tall for so stubby a plan, and the chapel-surrounded chevet is too elaborate for even an urban parish church.

Two later churches by Lassus, Saint-Nicholas at Moulins, built in collaboration with L.-D.-G. Esmonnot (1807-80) in 1849, and Saint-Pierre at Dijon of 1853 hardly rival Sainte-Clotilde in size, elaboration, or even plausibility. Viollet-le-Duc was rather more of an executant architect than Lassus, even though in this decade and the next most of his vast energy and very considerable archaeological knowledge went into the restoration of medieval monuments. At Notre-Dame in Paris the Chapter House that he designed is a wholly new construction of 1847 not unworthy of comparison with the best work of Scott in these years. The block of flats (Plate 56) he built at 28 Rue de Berlin (now de Liège) in Paris in 1846-8—his first executed building—may better be compared with the most advanced English secular Gothic of its date, Salvin’s Peckforton, say, or Butterfield’s St Augustine’s College, Canterbury. The front is so simple and straightforward in composition that it fits between more conventional façades with no awkwardness, and the rather plain detailing has the ‘realism’ that was coming to be admired by this date in the most advanced English circles.

The Romanesquoid design of Fontaine’s Chapelle-Saint-Ferdinand of 1843 has been mentioned. The use of such forms was in the forties even more exceptional in France than in England. In 1852 Didron estimated—probably with some exaggeration—that over two hundred Neo-Gothic churches had been built or were building in France, a record which compares statistically, if in no other way, with English church production in this period. None of them, however, is as impressive to later eyes as Saint-Paul at Nîmes, which follows with notable success the alternative Romanesquoid mode of Fontaine’s chapel. C.-A. Questel (1807-88), a pupil of Blouet and Duban, the architect of this church, had evidently studied the Romanesque with the care and enthusiasm usually lavished on the Gothic by his generation, and the result is so great an advance over Fontaine’s work that the resemblance is merely nominal. Thus might the Camdenians have hoped to build had they considered the twelfth-century Romanesque of France as worthy of conscientious emulation as the fourteenth-century Gothic of England. Saint-Paul is a large cruciform edifice, rib-vaulted throughout in a proto-Gothic way, and crowned with a great central lantern. The detail is plausible in its design, neither too skimpy nor too elaborate, although the execution lacks any real feeling for medieval craftsmanship in stone. Questel’s church, however, is as much of an exception as Fontaine’s chapel. No Romanesque Revival got under way in the forties in France in the way that one did to a certain extent in Germany, and the few other Romanesquoid churches of high quality belong to the next period (see Chapter 8).

Minor evidence of French interest—and rising interest—in the Picturesque is not hard to find in these decades, but that is all there is. No Picturesque modes comparable to those of the Anglo-Saxon world became widely popular. In the first decade of the century the brothers Caccault built at Clisson[141] in the Vendée a whole village based on their memories of the Roman Campagna, a more considerable essay in the Italian Villa vein than anything carried out in England. But the asymmetrically towered Italian Villa[142] did not mature in France in the way that it did in England, Germany, and the United States. Séheult’s _Recueil_ of 1821, of which a second edition appeared in 1847, is one of the earliest and richest repositories of inspiration drawn from rustic Italian building; but the edifices Séheult illustrated, however Picturesque in other ways, are all symmetrical and quite in the Durand tradition. J.-J. Lequeu (1758-_c._ 1824)[143] had produced bolder projects a generation earlier. These are often asymmetrical, generally quite wildly eclectic, and very vigorously plastic; but such things rarely, if ever, came to execution in France except as garden fabricks. Lequeu had no success at all in his later years.

Moreover, the Rustic Cottage mode seems to have struck no real roots in France, even though the painter Hubert Robert and the architect Richard Mique (1728-94), in designing the fabricks of Marie Antoinette’s Hameau at the Petit Trianon in 1783-6, had followed native rather than English rural models. Under the Restoration and the July Monarchy inspiration came generally from English Cottage books. Visconti’s Château de Lussy, S.-et-M., of 1844, though a fairly large structure, is really in the English Cottage mode with an asymmetrically organized plan and an irregularly composed exterior. This is almost unique and, in any case, quite undistinguished. A more vigorous flow of rustic influence entered France via Alsace and directly from Switzerland. The Chalet aux Loges of 1837 by Bonneau near Versailles was, as its name implies, a Swiss Chalet, but it quite lacked the integrity of structural expression and the originality of plastic organization of Eidlitz’s Willoughby house in Newport, R.I., which is, of course, considerably later in date. Occasional imitations of the _style François I_, such as the already mentioned country house by Canissié at Draveil, S.-et-O., have some irregularity both of outline and of plan; but in general the _François I_ of the July Monarchy, like so much of the Jacobethan of Early Victorian England, is Picturesque only in detail, not in general conception.

In 1840 the elder Bridant, who also built Chalets in the succeeding years around the lake at Enghien, a watering-place on the outskirts of Paris, built a Gothic ‘Castel’ on the plain of Passy, then a fairly open suburb. This was markedly asymmetrical and consistently medieval in detail. The contemporary fame of this enlarged garden fabrick—for such it really was—indicates its unique position in contemporary production, as unique as Moffatt’s Gothic house in Park Lane in London. L.-M. Boltz, an architect of Alsatian if not German origin but a pupil of Henri Labrouste, had some success with a less feudal mode, half-timbered and asymmetrical, in the forties—a house of 1842 at Champeaux, S.-et-M., was typical.

This modest influx into France of Picturesque models from contemporary Germany as well as from contemporary England might lead one to assume that the Picturesque, if not the Gothic Revival, was more significant in Central Europe. In Germany and Austria, however, as also in Scandinavia, Picturesque and medievalizing tendencies mostly merged with Romantic Classicism in the _Rundbogenstil_ rather than standing apart, thus constituting neither an opposition eventually rising to triumph in the English way, nor a mere gesture of aberrant protest as in France.

Schinkel’s interest in Gothic has already been touched on, but none of his more ambitious Gothic projects ever got beyond the drawing-board (see Chapter 2). There are fewer such, in any case, belonging to his later than to his earlier years. Moreover, the Gothic of the early projects naturally belongs to the contemporary High Romantic world of Wyatt’s Fonthill Abbey and Latrobe’s alternative design for the Baltimore Cathedral, not to the ethical and archaeological milieu of Pugin and the Camdenians. Most of the virtues—by no means negligible—of his Berlin Werder Church of the twenties are not Gothic virtues—not at any rate as Englishmen of the succeeding decades understood them—they are rather Romantic Classical virtues. The principal interest of his earlier Kreuzberg Memorial lies in its cast-iron material, a material anathema to Pugin as a ‘modernistic’ innovation. The Babelsberg Schloss, based principally on the modern castles that he saw on his visit to England in 1826, makes no pretensions to archaeological correctness in the way of Pugin’s Alton Castle of about 1840 or Salvin’s still later Peckforton.

A few Castellated mansions of more local inspiration, such as Hohenschwangau in Upper Bavaria, as reconstructed by J. D. Ohlmüller (1791-1839) in 1832-7, are closer in spirit to Pugin’s and Salvin’s ideals. Hohenschwangau, like certain castles built in this period on the Rhine, exploits the Picturesque possibilities of a fine site and the nostalgic overtones of a district with a romantic medieval past. Schloss Berg in Bavaria, which owes its present very domesticated Gothic character to the work done there by Eduard Riedel (1813-85) in 1849-51, hardly deserves mention in this connexion any more than do Schinkel’s more or less medievalizing country houses, so crisp and regular is their design. Curiously enough, the vast Schloss at Schwerin, begun by G. A. Demmler (1804-86) in 1844, is a more elaborate and extensive example of _François I_ than anything this period produced in France (Plate 57B). It is also notably Picturesque, with innumerable towers and gables disposed around the sides of an irregularly polygonal court. Stüler carried this extraordinary pile to completion after Demmler left Schwerin in 1851. Not very Picturesque, but representing another sort of medievalism, were two Venetian Gothic houses Am Elbberg in Dresden, built with considerable archaeological plausibility by an architect named Ehrhardt in the mid forties. They provide a curious premonition of Ruskin and the High Victorian Gothic of England (see Chapter 10). Semper’s Gothic Cholera Fountain of 1843 in Dresden has already been mentioned.

As in France, much energy went at this time into the restoration and completion of major medieval churches in Germany. Most notable in this connexion was the work on Cologne Cathedral begun in 1824 by F. A. Ahlert (1788-1833), continued by E. F. Zwirner (1802-61), and finally completed by Richard Voigtel (1829-1902) in 1880. Assisting Zwirner, who had worked earlier under Schinkel on the Kolberg Town Hall, was (among others) Friedrich von Schmidt (1825-91), after 1860 the most important Gothic Revivalist in Austria (see Chapters 8 and 11). No more than in France did this activity in ‘productive archaeology’ in Germany lead to new building of much interest, not at least until Schmidt began to work in Vienna.

Ohlmüller’s Mariahilfkirche outside Munich, begun in 1831 and completed after his death by Ziebland, the next considerable essay in ecclesiastical Gothic in Germany after Schinkel’s Berlin church, is certainly much less appealing than is his mountain castle. The hall-church form, authentically German though it was, produced a clumsily proportioned mass, at the front of which a stubby tower ending in an openwork spire seems to be ‘riding the roof’. This church is as ‘advanced’, in the sense of being fairly plausible archaeologically, as Barthélémy’s Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours built a decade later, but that is about all one can say for it. It certainly does not stand up to comparison with Rickman’s or Savage’s English churches of the twenties.

De Chateauneuf’s Petrikirche in Hamburg begun in 1843, or at least its tower, has already been mentioned (Plate 57A). This is superior in design, and in some ways also better built, to most of Pugin’s churches of this date. It is, for example, rib-vaulted throughout in a quite plain but very competent way. The interior lacks, however, the strikingly simple proportions and the warm colour of the red brick exterior; above all, the complex spatial development of the transeptal members lacks clarity, although the plan was probably taken over from the medieval Petrikirche that had been burned. The Gothic churches of K. A. von Heideloff (1788-1865), beginning with his Catholic church in Leipzig built in the Weststrasse there in 1845-7, are hardly above the level of Ohlmüller’s and certainly much less successful than the Petrikirche, though Heideloff had a much higher reputation than de Chateauneuf with contemporaries as a specialist at Gothic on account of his published studies of medieval architecture.[144]

In Berlin most of the new churches of this period by Stüler, Strack, and others were in a Romanesquoid version of the _Rundbogenstil_. Of these elaborated and coarsened versions of Schinkel’s suburban-church projects of a decade earlier, Stüler’s Jacobikirche of 1844-5 was basilican in plan; his Markuskirche, begun in 1848, was of the central type but with a tall campanile rising at one side. The Berlin Petrikirche, built by Strack in 1846-50, was Gothic, however, and even clumsier than Ohlmüller’s much earlier Mariahilfkirche, which it very closely resembles. Nor was Stüler’s one important essay in Gothic, the Bartholomäuskirche, begun in 1854 and completed by Friedrich Adler (1827-?) in 1858, much better. In general, the first half of the century was well over before Gothic churches of any great size and pretension were built either in Germany or Austria. The largest and most prominent, the Votivkirche in Vienna (Plate 99A), for the designing of which Heinrich von Ferstel (1828-83) won the competition in 1853 when he was only twenty-five, was not begun until 1856 nor completed until 1879 (see