Chapter 19: ). Three houses by Ashbee side by side in Cheyne Walk in

London, No. 37 of 1894 and Nos 38-39 of 1904, represent the chronological span of his significant architectural production and illustrate clearly his characteristic progress from the Shavian to an originality at least comparable to Voysey’s. Closely associated with the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, Ashbee was like most of these men except Voysey[355] and Lutyens generally more active in the field of decorative art than in building. Right through this period English decorative art exercised a major influence on the Continent (see Chapters 16 and 17). So close is Mackintosh’s tie with the Continent that his schools and even his houses are better discussed in relation to the Art Nouveau.

Of all these English architects who have just been mentioned, Voysey was the most creative in the field of domestic architecture and, except for Lutyens, the most productive down at least through the early years of the twentieth century; after 1910 he built almost nothing at all. Yet Voysey did not die until 1941, by which time a younger generation, to his confusion, had accepted him as a father of a modern architecture that he disapproved as strongly as did Lutyens. In 1940 he returned almost from the grave to receive the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

From the Picturesque cottages of the opening decades of the nineteenth century to the early masterpieces of Wright and Voysey around 1900 is a far cry, further perhaps in the drastic revision that it represented of so old-established a building type as the dwelling-house than from Parris’s Market Street buildings in Boston of 1824 to Sullivan’s Carson, Pirie & Scott Store in Chicago as completed eighty years later in 1904. Yet in Anglo-American domestic architecture, quite as was the case with commercial architecture, real achievement recurred all through the century.

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