Creators (20 page)

Two questions arise about Pugin as a creator. First, how did he manage to get through this enormous volume of work in his short life? There are many answers. First, owing to his precocity, his full working life began in his mid-teens, and his learning curve as a Gothic enthusiast started even earlier. He did not waste time at Oxbridge or art schools or trying to learn from people who knew less than he did. Second, his dislike of time-wasting extended to every aspect of his life. He was a very decisive man and never dithered. He made decisions quickly and stuck to them. He was extremely businesslike, with a sharp eye for costs and an acute nose for smelling out waste and incompetent workmen. He knew exactly how everything was done. As a scene painter he had learned carpentry, and he kept his hand in. He could carve, mix paint, lay bricks, tile a roof, and operate a forge or furnace for metalwork. Early in his career he formed close links with a succession of expert craftsmen whose quality and taste he could trust and who ran their own businesses. They included John Hardman, a metalworker who originally specialized in brass buttons and medals but whom Pugin encouraged to branch out into every kind of ironwork, into ecclesiastical jewelry and fittings, and even into stained glass, though for the last Pugin also employed the master craftsman William Wailes, especially at Cheadle. For structures, Pugin used George Myers, a gifted carver of wood and stone who was also an enterprising, reliable, fast-working builder. For every kind of ceramic work, especially the encaustic tiles so prominent in his interiors, Pugin used Herbert Minton, and for textiles of every kind, from carpets to chair bottoms, and superb wallpapers (one of the most important features of the Parliament building), he had the help of John Gregory Crace, another outstanding craftsman-artist.
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All these men ran sound businesses and could be relied on absolutely to deliver on time and to meet the highest standards. And since Pugin knew almost as much about their work as they did themselves, their collaboration was a union of equals. They worked as a team. From his first teenage business, which foundered in bankruptcy when he was twenty, Pugin had learned a great deal, and thereafter he paid the closest attention to costs, kept impeccable accounts, and eliminated expensive administra
tive overhead almost completely. While Pugin at his perfectionist best was inevitably expensive, and his efforts at Cheadle drew groans from Shrewsbury’s agent, Pugin gave tremendous value for money. He worked at a great pace and made his subcontractors keep pace too—the best way of keeping down costs on a project—and his decisiveness meant that his work never had to be redone. Unlike most architects, he never wasted time or creative energy on having rows with clients. His lifelong association with trusted expert craftsmen meant he never had rows with them either. Pugin never ran an office crowded with expensive draftsmen and assistants. His office was his own mind, and his workroom. A snatch of dialogue survives: “I will send this to your clerk, Mr. Pugin.” “Clerk, sir? I never employ one. I should kill him in a week.”
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Though he reduced costs to a minimum, he carried all his accounts around with him, down to the minutest detail, “in a five-inch pocket book, kept in minute writing, like his diary.” Hence he could answer clients’ inquiries on the spot. He was an intensely practical man, “a serious sailor all his life,” who could do remarkable things with his huge, bare hands, including sewing his clothes.

His clothes and appearance tell a lot about him. Though only five feet four inches tall, he was immensely strong and formidable. He could easily “deck a man,” as he put it, and sometimes did, if he met with impertinence. He often wore a sailor’s jacket, pilot trousers, jackboots, and a windjammer hat. Once, thus dressed, he descended from the Calais boat and got into his usual first-class carriage at Dover. Another snatch of conversation is preserved: “Halloa, my man [said a fellow passenger], you have mistaken, I think, your carriage.” “I believe you are right. I thought I was in the company of gentlemen.”
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(That fellow passenger was lucky to escape decking.) Pugin had a broad chest; a massive forehead; restless, penetrating gray eyes; a loud voice; a tremendous laugh; long, thick straight hair; rapid movements; astonishing mental and physical energy; highly strung nerves; and a choleric, passionate temperament. He occasionally gave way to “honest rages with no malice in them,” and discerning people recognized “genius and enthusiasm in every line of his face.”

He must have been a curious, unforgettable figure to meet in
the street. He wore a wide-skirted black dress coat, a regency style he kept to the end of his life; loose trousers; shapeless shoes for endless tramping while he looked at buildings; and a black silk handkerchief wrapped round his neck. His overcoat was specially made with enormous pockets, to contain all his necessities—shaving things, change of linen, etc.—on his continental rambles, without the bother of luggage. On the return leg, he often threw away his dirty linen and instead stuffed his giant pockets with crucifixes, pieces of medieval stained glass or ornaments, and even on one occasion a monstrance. In contrast to this rough outdoor garb—which made him “look like a dissenting minister with a touch of the sailor”—when he was actually designing, at his Gothic desk he wore a black velvet gown like that of a medieval magus, though this too had giant pockets, inside and out. And for church, he wore black silk knee-breeches and silver-buckled shoes. Indeed, he even donned a surplice at his house in Ramsgate, in order to read vespers and compline in the attached church. As he put it, “I dress upon True Principles!”

This gives a clue to the second question that arises about Pugin. Since he was entirely devoted to reviving Gothic, can he really be called an original creative artist? Was he not a mere revivalist? The answer is an emphatic no. It must be borne in mind that in architecture there are, in practice, only three or four different ways of designing buildings. All were discovered not just centuries but millennia ago, and all subsequent building styles have been revivals, conscious or not. Egyptian architects of the Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom were revivalists. So were the Greeks and Romans. Romanesque architecture was a revival, and so was the classicism of the Italian Renaissance. Pointed-arch Gothic, which made its appearance in the late twelfth century, can be described as a new decorative style, though the buildings on which it was imposed had revivalist ground plans. Pugin believed that Gothic had grown up, pari passu, with civilized English society and was natural to England. He also believed, with more justice, that Gothic, once fully established in England, had never died out there. Indeed it is possible to point to Gothic forms used in every decade of the seventeenth century. Even St. Paul’s has, essentially, the ground plan of a Gothic
cathedral. If we look for the origins of the “Gothick revival,” we have to go far back into the eighteenth century. In England, Gothic is as much a tradition, reflecting a mood and a culture, as a style. Horace Walpole, in promoting “Strawberry Hill Gothick,” was working in that tradition. It is possible, as Kenneth Clark argued in his book on the Gothic revival, to cite direct links between Strawberry Hill and the “specimens” provided in the works of both Pugins, father and son. But they also, and especially the son, established historical accuracy based on observation and study; and their books, as Clark points out, mark the point at which “Walpole’s dream of correct Gothic was realisable.”
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Pugin assimilated Gothic to the point where it became part of his being. His passionate identification with it was so intense and complete that his imagination gothicized not just scenes but people. His second wife died in 1844, and eventually—after much searching and soul-searching—he was married again, to a delightful woman called Jane Knill, exclaiming, “I have got a first-rate Gothic woman at last.” He had eight children, all of them with Gothic credentials and all engaged in artistic activities. His life at Ramsgate was Gothic. He rose at six, to pray, like a Benedictine monk. Then he worked. There were family prayers at eight. He allowed only seven minutes for breakfast and fifteen for lunch. Compline in the church was invariably at eight, followed by supper at nine, then bed at ten. He did not smoke or drink, and he ate plain medieval food. He was excellent company, however—a superb conversationalist and particularly attractive to women, whether Gothic, classical, or baroque beauties. He was so immersed in Gothic that he was frightened of the dark and terrified of haunted rooms. Like Macbeth, he believed in ghosts. Also, he was so immersed in Gothic that he could let his artistic instincts roam freely through all its variations and, more important, its possibilities. This had a bearing on his creativity. He was just as innovative and unconstrained as a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century master mason asked to produce a new cathedral or add to an old one. Thus most of Pugin’s Gothic designs, for buildings, furniture, or anything else, are entirely original. Only occasionally are they conscious replicas, and then always for a particular reason. What is so remarkable about his work is that it is “correct” Gothic, being designed in that
spirit while having no precise precedent in the Middle Ages. Indeed he designed many Gothic objects that medieval people had never thought of, including an ingenious Gothic umbrella he used for sketching in the rain. From first to last he was a creative artist of extraordinary sensibility and on an enormous scale. He worked, in short, in the same way as the men who designed and built Chartres, Notre Dame, Canterbury, Wells, and Ely, except that he was supervised not by bishops and canons but by his own artistic conscience.

Pugin was not a Victorian but a romantic, who came to aesthetic consciousness in the Regency, and whose affinities were with Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Wordsworth rather than with Tennyson, Carlyle, or Ruskin. Oddly enough, though, he achieved his apotheosis as a designer in a quintessential Victorian event, the Great Exhibition of 1851. In general, the quality of design among the thousands of objects shown was deplorable and incoherent. The outstanding exception was the “Medieval Court,” in which all the craftsmen he had used and encouraged, especially Crace, Hardman, Minton, and Myers, got together to produce a glittering array of beautiful things, all in the Gothic manner, from tiles and wallpapers to lecterns, tabernacles, chairs, flower stands, brassware, and precious objects, tables, cabinets, textiles, and carpets, virtually all designed by Pugin. It was generally voted the centerpiece of the entire display; and designers, aesthetes, intellectuals, and opinion formers from all over the world turned it into a cult meeting place as long as the exhibition lasted. Afterward, many of its contents went into museums and collections. This was the event that turned Gothic revival into the normative style for ecclesiastical, state, and public buildings, not only in England but throughout the empire, and also in much of Europe and America. Scores of cathedrals and thousands of churches were built as Pugin would have wished—though not often so “correctly”—as were enormous edifices like Bombay’s principal railway station and London’s Law Courts. It was Pugin’s moment of triumph, and had he lived longer he would certainly have gone on to become one of the great Victorians, perhaps the greatest of them all. But by the end of 1851 he fell seriously ill, and the next year he died, mad. His architectural enemies (he had no others) said that his disorder
was “general paralysis of the insane,” the climax of syphilis, but the only evidence is that he was treated, at one point, with mercury. Though he was making little sense in his final days, he kept his creative spirit. His last recorded words were: “There is nothing worth living for but Christian architecture and a boat.”
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Just before he died, in September 1852, he designed a floriated cross for St. Mary’s Beverley. The drawing survives, and the cross was made—and very fine it is. Thus passed one of the most continuously, persistently, and intensely creative artists of all time.

If there were world enough and time I would like to devote myself to tracing the influence of Pugin, and his interaction with three other great nineteenth-century men of art: John Ruskin (1819–1900), William Morris (1834–1896), and the French Gothic revivalist Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879). Ruskin was seven years younger than Pugin, and by the time he went to Christ Church, Oxford (soon to have its riverfront gothicized in exactly the way Pugin urged), much of Pugin’s written work was available, and he eagerly studied it. Indeed Ruskin’s first important writing, “The Poetry of Architecture,” published in the
Architectural Magazine
in 1837–1838, was the direct result of Pugin’s teaching. Ruskin went on, in
The Seven Lamps of Architecture
(1849) and
The Stones of Venice
(1851–1853), to carry further Pugin’s essential message that the way men build reflects the spiritual as well as the material value of their culture. Indeed Ruskin’s central demand, for moral principles in architecture, was essentially a recapitulation of Pugin’s teaching. Ruskin was immensely influential among clever young men, especially at Oxford, just as Pugin was among craftsmen; and one of Ruskin’s followers was Morris, twenty-two years younger than Pugin and thus a true Victorian. Morris decided to become an architect after seeing the Medieval Court in 1851 and reading Ruskin and Pugin at Oxford. After visiting the cathedrals of Chartres, Amiens, and Rouen, Morris, following Ruskin, came to believe that medieval craftsmen had enjoyed much greater freedom in their work and art than their modern equivalents, who were enslaved by an industrial system which demanded uniformity, mass production, and above all large profits to make an adequate return on capital, and so used cheap materials and shoddy methods. Mor
ris, as a youthful craftsman, learning tapestry weaving, carpentry, sewing, painting, and sculpture as well as building, agreed with Pugin and Ruskin that Gothic was the supreme mode; he called Ruskin’s
On the Nature of Gothic
, which he reprinted sumptuously when he created the Kelmscott Press, “One of the few necessary meritable utterances of the century.” But what Morris learned from the medieval world was not so much the inevitability of Gothic, except in so far as it sprang from nature, the source of all art, as the importance of individual craftsmanship. Art was the superlative form of craft, the foundation of all creative activity. Instead of using a group of firms, as Pugin did, Morris, who inherited capital from his family and had a shrewd (even harsh) business sense, formed what artists came to call “the Firm,” known as “Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company, Fine Art Workmen in Painting, Carving, Furniture, and the Metals.” It listed on its first circular Ford Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Philip Webb, P. P. Marshall, and Morris himself. This alliance, which included six major artists, naturally did not last, any more than the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, one of its precursors, lasted. But Morris continued his firm throughout his life, in one form or another, and made it profitable and productive.
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