Chapter 11: ). Moreover, the detailing is of a distinctly French

twelfth-century order with very few eclectic or Italianate touches, thus recalling the winning design for Lille Cathedral that he had prepared with Clutton in 1855. Yet the contrast with contemporary Continental Gothic—especially with Lille Cathedral as finally executed by others—is almost as great as in the case of the rather more original English churches of this period by Butterfield or Street.

In the interior of St Finbar’s Burges developed the theme of articulation, a theme more characteristically Early English than ‘Early French’, with remarkable plastic vigour, while the handsome wooden roof, so rare a feature in medieval France, lends to the whole an unmistakably Victorian air. Less subtle, less aesthetic, than other churches of the sixties by younger men, St Finbar’s has the sort of athletic strength that is characteristic of much High Victorian Gothic, expressed in unusually literate, not to say archaeological, terms.

Burges’s church opened the road again towards a more ‘correct’ imitation of the medieval High Gothic, a road along which Pearson soon proceeded more rapidly and more doggedly than he. Yet Pearson’s own South London church of 1863-5, St Peter’s in Kennington Lane, Vauxhall, is more typically High Victorian than St Finbar’s. The carved capitals and the heavy scale of the stone detail are rather ‘Early French’. But walls and vaults are of London stock brick and there is some polychromy of the quieter, less Butterfieldian, sort resembling a little White’s at St Saviour’s. The continuity of the chancel and rounded apse with the nave echoes the ‘unified space’ of Clutton’s Leamington interior. Puginian articulation of plan and mass was henceforth somewhat out of date.

The Albert Memorial[228] in Hyde Park in London is a monument generally—and not unjustly—considered the perfect symbol of this High Victorian period, more perfect than the Houses of Parliament (in the early sixties at last approaching completion) were of the previous Early Victorian period. In 1861 Queen Victoria’s beloved husband, the Prince Consort, died. In the competition for a national memorial to rise in Hyde Park near the site of the Crystal Palace, held the next year, G. G. Scott almost inevitably won first place. Construction of the Albert Memorial began in 1863 and took nearly ten years. By the time it was completed in 1872 critics of advanced taste were already condemning it, yet it represents precisely what Scott most liked to do and what he undoubtedly did best—in his own words, this his ‘most prominent work’ represented his ‘highest and most enthusiastic efforts’. It is, moreover, an epitome of the aspirations[229] that were most widely held when it was designed (Plate 90).

The contrast between this elaborate shrine and Scott’s modest and essentially archaeological Martyrs’ Memorial of 1841 at Oxford is very great—what a long distance the English Gothic Revival had travelled in a score of years! Among Early Victorian memorials the Prince Consort’s cenotaph is rather more like Kemp’s Scott Monument in Edinburgh (Plate 51) than like the Oxford one. But where Kemp’s is soft and monochrome, this is hard and almost kaleidoscopically polychromatic. Scott’s theme is still that of the fourteenth-century English Eleanor Crosses, as is certainly appropriate for a monument to a Royal spouse; but the inspiration came in the main from relatively small reliquaries and other medieval works executed in metal and embellished with enamels and semi-precious stones.

The Martyrs’ Memorial was purely English, the specific precedents for the Albert Memorial mostly Continental: Italian, French, German, and Flemish. The materials are cold and shining, polished granites, marbles, and serpentines of various colours; and much of the detail is executed in gun-metal left plain or gilded. A profusion of white marble sculpture at various scales leads up to the seated bronze figure of the Prince by J. H. Foley, finally installed in 1876, over which is a vaulted canopy of brilliantly coloured glass mosaic. Enamels, cabochons of marble or serpentine, and intricately crisp detail of the most metallic character carry out Scott’s basic idea of a ciborium enlarged, like Bernini’s in St Peter’s, to fully architectural scale.

Beside the Albert Memorial most of Scott’s other work of this period lacks interest. His churches, particularly, are likely to be dull and respectable, reflecting the new eclectic tastes of the day only in a rather inconspicuous way. His Exeter College Chapel at Oxford of 1856-8 is a sort of Sainte-Chapelle; St John’s College Chapel at Cambridge of 1863-9 is equally monumental but somewhat less French in character and also more original in its proportions. His secular work at Oxford and Cambridge is also dull, lacking the Ruskinian touches that give a certain vitality to the Meadow Buildings built for Christ Church in 1863 by Sir Thomas Deane and his son Thomas Newenham Deane (1828-99).

Far finer, however, is their Kildare Street Club in Dublin, facing the Trinity College Museum across an expanse of lawn; for this continues the best Ruskinian tradition of the work that they did earlier with Woodward.[230]

A very striking example of the Gothic of the early sixties in England, superior to anything at Oxford or Cambridge, is the Merchant Seamen’s Orphan Asylum of 1861 by G. Somers Clark (1825-82), now the Wanstead Hospital, in a suburb north-east of London. This is actually more what is supposed to be ‘Ruskinian’, because of its Venetian detailing, than the very original Dublin clubhouse with its consistent theme of segmental arches and its bold naturalistic carving; but, like that, the Wanstead building is generically High Victorian in the asymmetrical massing, the strong colours of the black-banded red brickwork, and the surprising richness of the decoration Clark lavished on a utilitarian structure.

In the early sixties several younger men, most of them trained in Street’s office, were already turning away from the stridency of the work of the High Victorian leaders towards a simpler and suaver mode. Webb’s houses of this period have been mentioned, and will be again (see