William Burges - Knockback at Knightshayes

William Burges pulled out all the stops for his Devon client, Sir John Heathcoat Amory, and in 1873 he presented Sir John with a magnificent folio of 57 pages of watercolour drawings of his detailed plans for the interior decor of Knightshayes Court.  Burges’ relatively restrained plans for the exterior and internal partitioning had been approved in 1869 and by 1873, construction was well underway. Sadly for Burges, Sir John would prove to be a lot less indulgent than his regular patron, the Marquess of Bute whose financial commitment to Burges’ extravagantly ornate visions had no limits. While Bute’s coal mines and ports delivered an endless stream of cash, the Heathcoat Amory business (lace and textiles) was more exposed to economic downturns and the money simply wasn’t there to pay for Burges’ lavish scheme.  Sir John occupied himself with hunting foxes and stags on Exmoor, shooting on his Scottish estate or fishing in Norway where he owned a lodge.  It’s easy to imagine that Burges’ bejewelled medievalist fantasies would have held little appeal for such a tweedy character and in 1874 he sacked Burges from the project. 

J D Crace inherited the Burges design scheme and diluted it to suit the family purse and taste.  Crace was a remarkably versatile and successful interior designer and produced a modified version that retained some of Burges’ ideas (such as the jelly mould ceiling decor), discarded the wilder fantasies and came up with a scheme that had a little of Burges about it while being much easier on the eye.  Even this would prove too much for the family who in a few years had contractors in to conceal the ornate coffered ceilings (largely the work of Crace). Fireplaces and other features would follow until what remained was a conventional country house Georgian interior. For Burges, this was another deep frustration, in a career marked by false starts, unrealised projects, and rejected competition entries. Compounded in 1854 when Burgess won the competition for a cathedral in Lille fair and square, only to be laid low by a change in the rules that handed the commission to a French team of architects.

Even without the tower that Burges designed for the west wing, Knightshayes remains an imposing presence thanks to its subtly detailed physical mass.  From the Drawing Room the parkland gently descends, offering a distant view of the family factory and its pair of chimneys. Sir John found running  a business got in the way of the pleasures of the chase and left the task to his younger brother, but without those profits his fine country house would never have been built.  In their growing aversion to all things High Victorian, the family were ahead of the times - several decades would pass before popular taste would finally condemn it to obscurity.  When its rehabilitation came to pass, the National Trust was left with an enormous task to return the house to its as-built original condition.  The photos were taken in mid-November on a day of exceptional warm sunshine.  Regrettably there was no access to the first floor rooms due to a post-Covid shortage of volunteers.

 

Great Railway Stations Number 12: Tokyo

In 1880 the 26 year old Tatsuno Kingo was working as a student in the architectural practice of William Burges, master of the Gothic Revival. Returning to Japan after Burges’s death in 1881, he established himself as an educationalist and architect in the Western style. Banks and institutions formed the majority of his clients. Later he was appointed architect of Tokyo Station on which work began in 1908. Completion was in 1914 – it opened for business on December 20th. The original 4 platforms have expanded to more than 20 today. A three-storey extended red brick façade with two ribbed domes was designed to impress. A massive steel frame enabled the building to survive earthquake damage in 1923 but US bombing in 1945 greatly diminished it – post-war repairs saw the station reduced to two-storeys while the ruined domes were replaced by simplified angular structures as shown in the last two cards below. A threatened demolition was resisted by the public and a five-year renovation completed in 2012 restored the station to its 1914 splendour. With the singular difference that the present building must compete for attention with the enormous office blocks that tower over it.

Cork Flooring

The High Altar in the apse at St. Fin Barre’s Cathedral in Cork rests on a mosaic floor designed by William Burges. Crustaceans, molluscs and amphibians in mosaic form share the space with artisans, scholars and parfait knights. The initial inspiration for this piscatorial fantasy came from St. Matthew, “.... the kingdom of Heaven is like unto a net that was cast into the sea and gathered of every kind”. There’s a useful account of the mosaics in J Mordaunt Crook’s William Burges and the High Victorian Dream – Crook is well disposed toward the mosaics but clearly regards them as a minor aspect of Burges’s achievement. Crook tells how they were manufactured in 1877 by Burke & Co. in Paris by a team of Italian craft-workers from Udine using Pyrenean marble fragments. The imagery has a light and playful character that is not something routinely found in a High Anglican place of worship but one of Burges’s many redeeming features was an appetite for fun and a liking for puns. The latter inspired him to include bobbing corks (unfortunately not visible in this selection) in his aquatic fantasia.

Bingeing on Burges

William Burges must have been the least affordable of Victorian architects. The complexity of his designs, the scope of his ambition, the size of his workforce and his fondness for rare and precious materials swallowed up stupendous sums of client money. There were many wealthy Victorian captains of industry and it’s significant that Burges was employed by the wealthiest of them all – the 3rd. Marquess of Bute. Every ton of coal that came to the surface of the South Wales coalfield, every Taff Vale Railway coal train that wound its way out of the valleys en route for the coast and every scoop that was loaded on to the waiting ships in the ports of Cardiff and Barry contributed to the Bute fortune.

Bute was a complicated personality – an intellectual and aesthete, a scholar and philanthropist and a man of devout faith and piety. His vast business interests seem to have made minimal demands on his time leaving him free to indulge his passions for architecture, scholastic research and good works. We must assume that the contrast between the world of exotic ornamentation that he and Burges created and the dark and dangerous world inhabited by the tens of thousands who toiled mightily on his behalf is not something that troubled him – it may never have crossed his mind. A further contradiction for Burges lay in the fact that all his fabulous work was paid for with the proceeds of the dehumanising industrial activity that his heroes, Pugin and Ruskin, deplored and despised. But, either by accident or design, Bute and Burges left behind a creation that continues to intrigue and fascinate and genuinely lifts the spirits by virtue of its visual and spatial splendour, extraordinary extravagance and the occasional somersault into the realms of poetry. 

Burges was an enemy of moderation and a master of excess with a sharp eye for the absurd and an absence of sentimentality. He displayed little, if any of the egotism, vanity and self-importance of many of his professional colleagues and his instincts were collaborative with a dedicated team of expert craft workers without whose skills his designs could never have been realised. Widely travelled and well read, he made detailed studies of the buildings he saw across France, Italy, Sicily and Turkey. In private life he was a sociable bachelor with a taste for alcohol and opium and a large circle of friends among the Pre-Raphaelites. The suffocating odour of Victorian piety was escaped by means of regular visits to the Judge and Jury Club with its rowdy recreations of notorious criminal trials. Another relief from engagement with the higher faculties was a trip to Jemmy Shaw’s public house for an evening of ratting. Inherited wealth meant that he could choose the commissions that engaged his interest and suited him best. 

The world of Victorian architects was divided into warring factions locked in endless disputation as to who was most securely placed on the side of righteousness. On the great divide between those who looked to Ruskin for ideological purity and those who accepted the realities of technological advances (Paxton, Owen Jones, Digby Wyatt, Henry Cole) Burges was firmly on the side of Ruskin and a more than willing, active participant in the debate. He stood up for the principles of the Gothic Revival and condemned the excesses of Modern Gothic. As his colleagues gradually defected to the Old English and Queen Anne Revival styles in the late 1870s, Burges was scornful – nothing offended his sensibilities more than a sash window. 

Wandering around Cardiff Castle is to take a trip through the embalmed remains of a High Victorian dream. It was a dream made possible by unlimited resources with ambitions to match, the services of an inspired architect and colourist and an unshakeable conviction that it was an expression of the highest moral purpose. Each room is a standalone fantasy – there is little sense of continuity other than a shared intensity. Behind the moral purpose was an enormous exercise in indulgence on the part of both architect and client. For Burges it was an opportunity to devise decorative schemes without limit in either complexity or resources. Bute’s vast wealth could support anything that came from Burges’s imagination. Inspiration was drawn from a bewildering variety of sources – Gothic, Romanesque, Byzantine, medievalism, orientalism, the ancient world, old and new testament, heraldic devices, lives of the saints, the occult, Chaucer, Aesop’s Fables, and the closely observed natural world. Playful vignettes from the natural world were artfully deployed throughout to counter any excess of sobriety. 

In the end it’s an overwhelming experience – simply too much to take in when every surface is animated with repeating patterns or pictorial symbols. Ceilings are inlaid with precious metals, fragmented mirrors or painted with decorative schemes of almost terrifying complexity. The ceiling of the Arab Room is a disorientating, frenzied cascade of intoxicating Islamic arabesques. The chimneypiece in the Library is a riot of ornamentation – carved figures, each representing an ancient language (Greek, Assyrian, Hebrew, Egyptian, and Celtic), are surrounded by decorative panels and friezes including fir cones at the top and birds in the middle. Another chimneypiece in the Winter Smoking Room is a tour-de-force with a frieze of colourful carved figures representing the pleasures of medieval courtly life in miniature – archery, hunting with dogs, decorous courtship and a blazing fire in the company of faithful canines. The Winter Smoking Room is dedicated to representations of the passage of time – the painted ceiling displays the signs of the zodiac. Days of the week, hours of the day and the four seasons appear elsewhere. The painted and gilded ceiling of Bute’s bedroom is inlaid with bevelled mirrors to reflect the inscribed Greek lettering when seen from the bed. The letters spell out the name John and refer to John the Baptist (whose sculpture is elsewhere in the room) and the 3rd. Marquess himself. This infinite repetition was designed as an affirmation of faith. Perhaps the most famous detail is the gilded crocodile that rests on the handrail on the grand staircase – an emblem of incongruity that exemplifies Burges’s most redeeming feature and brings the dazzled and befuddled spectator back to earth with a sigh of relief. 

The great source-book on Burges, “William Burges and the High Victorian Dream” by the impeccable J. Mordaunt Crook has been liberally consulted.