Chapter 3

Perhaps the best way to illustrate the different phases of Free Classic will be to group the reigns of William and Anne in one period of a quarter of a century, half in the seventeenth and half in the eighteenth, following the Stuart, or Jacobean, and preceding the Georgian. At first sight there appears to be little promise of finding any genuine art in English works of this period. The Mediaeval Ecclesiastical style had died out nearly two hundred years before, and during the interval the revival of classic architecture had steadily advanced from small and rude beginnings to a respectable position, with an academic system, so to speak, which, although it never attained in England the appreciation which led to its luxurious development on the Continent, found expression in many works of dignity and excellence. During the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. a domestic style for manor-houses had sprung up, based upon Gothic traditions of the Tudor type, with an admixture of the Renaissance of that day. This transitional manner struggled through the Commonwealth comparatively undisturbed, losing by degrees all traces of its mediaeval origin. It maintained, however, partly perhaps by the intention of its designers, but chiefly through accident, a character of picturesqueness and homeliness.

The great fire of 1666 desolated two-thirds of London, destroying thirteen thousand two hundred houses and eighty-nine churches, including St. Paul's Cathedral. Down to this time the architecture of London had been mostly of the timber, brick, and plaster type of the Tudors. The houses were crowded closely together, covering every available piece of ground, and overhanging story above story until in many cases the daylight was almost excluded from the narrow courts and crooked alleys. Many of these houses were built of slight materials, covered on the exterior with painted planks and on the interior with plaster. During the reign of James I. it was enacted that the fronts of city houses should be of brick or stone. In many cases, however, a compromise was made in favor of heavy timber fronts, which were often richly carved and moulded, the panels filled with bricks and plastered, the sides away from the street being still built of wood. In these houses we find numerous instances of the picturesque oriels and windows adopted by the designers of the modern Queen Anne school.

The fire wrought a complete change in building-construction and in the health of the city. The plague, until then a constant visitor, disappeared. The streets and courts were widened and much improved, and an entirely new class of buildings arose above the ruins of ancient London. Immediately after the fire a proclamation was issued by the king, giving instructions for certain reforms in building-construction. This may be called the birth of the movement which later on developed into the Queen Anne or Free Classic style of the early eighteenth century. In this proclamation the king commands as follows: "In the first place, the woful experience in this late heavy visitation hath sufficiently convinced all men of the pernicious consequences which have attended the building with timber, and even with stone itself, and the notable benefit of brick, which in so many places hath resisted and even extinguished the fire; and we do hereby declare that no man whatsoever shall presume to erect any house or building, great or small, but of brick or stone; and if any man shall do the contrary, the next magistrate shall forthwith cause it to be pulled down and such further course taken for his punishment as he deserves; and we suppose that the notable benefit many men have received from those cellars which have been well and strongly arched will persuade most men who build good houses to practise that good husbandry by arching all convenient places." By an act of the Common Council, passed on the 29th of April, 1667, in furtherance of the king's proclamation, it is ordered, among other details, that the purveyors "do encourage and give directions to all builders, for ornament sake, that the ornaments and projections of the front of buildings be of rubbed bricks, and that all the naked parts of the walls be done of rough bricks neatly wrought, or all rubbed, at the discretion of the builder." Permission was at the same time given to enrich buildings by variety in the forms of roofs, balconies, etc.

The urgent demand for new edifices to replace those destroyed by fire, and the necessity for observing strict economy in their erection, precluded picturesque grouping and well-studied designs. The quaint but dangerous architecture of 1666 was rapidly replaced by rows of plain, monotonous brick buildings, devoid of artistic merit. In Cheapside and some of the more important thoroughfares the houses erected during this period were of a somewhat better character, taller, and more elegant in design.

While improvement in the character of domestic architecture was thus hampered by economic considerations and an intricate system of land-tenures, public and ecclesiastical architecture was greatly improved. The rebuilding of St. Paul's Cathedral and fifty city churches by Sir Christopher Wren marks an epoch in the history of the English Church which should not be overlooked. For the first time since the Reformation the planning and general features of church edifices were made to conform to the exigencies of the Protestant faith and a simplified ritual. Rarely has such an opportunity for distinction been vouchsafed to any architect as that which fell to the lot of Wren; and he proved himself equal to the task. Fergusson is my authority for the statement that during the last forty years of the seventeenth century no building of importance was erected of which he was not the architect. Had his design for a complete rebuilding of the burnt district been carried out, London would have risen from its ashes one of the most convenient and beautiful cities in the world. The edifices erected by Wren are models of their kind. A thorough constructor, he was not less an artist in his feelings, and boldly adapted the systems of the Renaissance to the requirements of the times, modifying his details to meet the exigencies which arose. The "Free Classic" of Wren was certainly very different in conception and execution from the stiff and formal expression which we note in the works of his immediate successors, several of whom were, however, men of marked ability. It was, moreover, immeasurably superior to the classic attempts of the architects of the middle Georgian period, who, carried away by the enthusiasm awakened by the perusal of the newly-published "Antiquities" of Stuart and Revett, attempted to adapt Doric porticos, hexastyle, octostyle, etc., to modern domestic architecture.

With the accession of William and Mary, England and the Continent became more closely united. French, Spanish, and Florentine styles of dress became the fashion, and furniture designed in the Flemish and Dutch workshops succeeded to the heavier examples of the preceding reigns. The opening of the China trade and the importation of Delft porcelain exerted a marked influence upon the tastes of society. An affected admiration for Dutch topiary also became a fashion. It flourished for a time, and reached its utmost limit of quaint absurdity in the reign of Queen Anne.

Architecture also felt the influence of the Dutch school: brick was by law and custom the vernacular building-material of London, as it was of the Netherlands, and high-stepped gables with wavy lines became frequent. Broken pediments with volute terminals were placed over doors and windows; while a slight admixture of wrought and moulded bricks was often added to give some degree of elegance and richness to the facades. This use of moulded brick had played a prominent part in the old Tudor works; but Parliament had placed heavy and almost prohibitory taxes upon its manufacture and that of glass, thus vitiating the taste of the designer by the necessity for studying strict economy in construction. The manor-houses erected during the reigns of William and Anne are of a different type: they are bold and massive, picturesque in outline, and semi-classic in detail.

Through the Georgian reigns and that of William IV. the taste for Free Classic continued, gradually becoming more debased, with a few feeble attempts at a revival of mediaeval work, as shown by Walpole at Strawberry Hill; while in the cities the schools of Nash and Wyatt were stuccoing the honest brick-work of their street-fronts into bad imitations of Roman palaces. This called forth such epigrams as,--

Augustus of old was for building renowned,-- For of marble he left what of brick he had found; But is not our Nash a still greater master? He found London brick, and will leave it plaster.

The earlier years of Victoria's reign were marked by aspirations for a better state of things, and discussions between the rival schools of Classicists and Mediaevalists. The latter carried the day, and, after an heroic struggle and many failures, England awoke from her long lethargy, to find herself the possessor of a noble architecture, a true exponent of ecclesiastical art and tradition, although confessedly far from perfect when applied to domestic buildings. For these latter edifices the old manor-houses, with their many mullioned windows and Tudor arcuation, formed the basis for design, and machicoli, turrets, and open timber roofs became the fashion for country-houses; but the city dwellings were erected in a style that was a compromise between the Georgian and the semi-Gothic, the most difficult problem being to reconcile the double hung sash with the pointed arches of mediaeval precedent.

English architecture was in this uncertain and transitory state when, in 1870, Parliament passed the Elementary Education Act. This was an opportunity long waited for, and the architects seized upon it with avidity. The natural desire was to give to the school-buildings a character distinctively their own, simple in plan and construction, with but little architectural display, and built of the vernacular constructive material of English cities,--red brick. Moulded brick could now be procured in abundance, the tax having been removed by Parliament in 1850. Such was the beginning of modern Queen Anne architecture. From small beginnings it has developed into an harmonious and well-defined system of domestic building, very different in its better phases from the stiff and starched appearance of its prototypes, being marked by breadth and freedom of treatment, and in many cases by great richness of detail.

The architects of the United States soon caught the enthusiasm of their English brethren, and the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 served to intensify the feeling of patriotism. If Queen Anne architecture is dear to Englishmen, it should be doubly so to us. In England the history of building may be traced back for centuries, style following style in regular sequence, one growing out of and interwoven with another. With us the case is different. The early colonists landed in America when Jacobean architecture was at its best, but they could give little thought to style or detail. Protection from the elements and savage foes was their first requirement. Later, when they could give more attention to architecture as an art, Queen Anne ruled the popular taste, and our colonial mansions were built and decorated under the influence which surrounded the thought and literature of the time. Queen Anne or early Georgian is, therefore, our starting-point in architectural history. It is well to revive a taste for its quaint and home-like character, not merely for its own sake, but as a stepping-stone to something better and more enduring in the future.

Let us now briefly glance at the various constructive systems embraced in what is to-day known as Queen Anne architecture.

CONSTRUCTION.

In the sudden renaissance of Palladian detail and Dutch planning, known under the generic title of Queen Anne, we can distinctly trace the influence of three systems of construction. First in dignity, as in age, stands the cottage or old English style, claiming descent from the heavy Tudor mansions of rude stone, rough hewn timber, and white concrete filling, usually termed "magpie work," from the startling contrast between their white panels and tarred timbers. Of these old mansions numerous examples still remain: they were, for the most part, erected during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but in a few instances a much earlier date may be assigned. Their construction is of the most substantial character, and consists in great part of oak frame-work of large scantling, tenoned and pinned together, the spaces between the timbers being filled in on both sides with a composition of well-beaten clay, straw, and chalk, which has become almost as hard as stone. Embedded in this composition are stout oak laths, held in position by cross-sticks, to which they are bound by hazel withes, no nail being used in any part of the work. Second, Queen Anne proper, founded on the domestic architecture of the Netherlands,--a thoroughly appropriate system of construction for a country where brick is the vernacular building-material, and one which perhaps of all others is the most easily adapted to the requirements of city streets, narrow fronts, and lofty facades with but little projection to interrupt light and the various needs of traffic. Third, the style without a name, which during the last decade has gathered to itself a heterogeneous mass of details, both English and Continental, combined with picturesque groupings of parts to form a well-defined and pleasing whole. This system may certainly be called "free," but, as it appears to be simply a stepping-stone to something better and more in consonance with the rapid development of art and the sciences applied to domestic life, it might perhaps be well termed the Victorian Transition.

The originators of modern Queen Anne were men trained in the Gothic school, and their watchword was "true construction." This term seems to be the most elastic and enduring of all the "short and easily-applied rules" of the profession of architecture. It is, however, applied more exclusively to the works of revivalists, and is frequently used in advocacy of new methods and in condemnation of the old. The architects of the Victorian School had had it impressed upon their minds by Pugin, Eastlake, and others, that true construction did not exist after the Middle Ages,--the period of massive timber framing, heavy tables, mantel-trees, and settles, put together with wooden pins and disdaining all curves and wavy lines. For a time these professors of artistic truth were implicitly believed, and architects came to look upon stucco, plastering, glue, veneers, broken pediments, and applied ornamentation as monstrous emanations from diseased brains, bewildered and carried off their balance by the great upheaval of the Renaissance.

The rapidity with which a change of sentiment was achieved is one of the most remarkable phenomena in architectural history. The worshippers of "truth" and the rest of the "Seven Lamps," the plaster-ornament-breakers of 1860, became ten years later the loyal subjects of Queen Anne, accepting without question the tenets of Stuart and Revett, the Adams, and even of Nash and Wyatt, who carried the use of stucco and applied ornamentation to the extremity of extravagance.

In studying the constructive features of the Queen Anne renaissance, we find many examples of richly-ornamented facades, combined with affected picturesqueness and quaintness unthought of two hundred years ago. How are we to account for this change in favor of greater richness and profusion of detail in a professed revival of the pure and simple forms of the past, and for the well-established fact, easily recognized by the student of architecture, that the Queen Anne brick-work of to-day owes much of its effectiveness, constructively and aesthetically, to the teaching of an earlier school,--that of the Tudors?

Decorative brick-work, as we find it used in English architecture, is not simply the outgrowth of the Dutch school, introduced at the accession of William of Orange. For centuries it had been employed with success, particularly in Norfolk and other brick-districts. Under the Tudor sovereigns, moulded and carved brick-work attained a high standard of excellence. The buildings erected during this period were frequently enriched with delicately wrought string-moulds, gable-ends, and cornices, sharp in outline, crisp and spirited in detail. Even under the Stuarts, Inigo Jones and his great successor Wren executed some noble works in this material. Unfortunately for art, Parliament in 1625 established the rectangular dimensions of bricks, which thenceforward were moulded on one dreary model,--a block of clay nine by four by two and one-half inches. In 1784 Parliament again interfered, and levied heavy taxes upon all bricks modelled, whether such bricks were spoiled in the baking or not. This tax was in its action almost prohibitory of any attempt at establishing a higher grade of workmanship. In the long interval between 1625 and the repeal of the tax in 1850, workmen in clay forgot their cunning, and all desire for improvement in design had come to a stand-still.

The Victorian architects made strenuous efforts to reform so discreditable a state of things, and, after struggling against the ignorance of labor and the conservatism of brick-masters, attained their end, and when, in 1870, the School Board Act went into operation it found them ready, with well-trained mechanics at their command. In 1850 the revival and expansion of semi-classic architecture wrought in brick would have been impossible; in 1870 the building world was ripe for the change. The architects themselves, after receiving their early education under the leaders of the stucco and plaster school of the later Georgian reigns, had had their ideas purified and refined by the art-teachings of the Victorian Gothicists. The result was a spontaneous movement to develop a new system of construction, with lintelled openings and square fenestration,--Queen Anne modified and elevated by mediaeval teachings and traditions. A traditional manner, but a sensible one; a sudden fashion, if you will; a craze, but a craze upon which the architects of the future will probably look back with satisfaction, as a bold and successful step toward the solution of the vexed problem of domestic architecture,--how to make every man's house his proper dwelling, how to combine Sir Henry Wotton's three conditions of the art of well building,--"Commodity, Firmness, and Delight."

Leaving England, with its highly-developed and well-understood systems of construction as they existed in the seventeenth century, let us turn to the colonial work of the early settlers of America, keeping in mind the difficulties which surrounded them, and which not only influenced, but determined by absolute necessities, many of the constructive peculiarities which we note in their domestic buildings.

In the English colonies of North America we find, between the first settlement and the opening of the Revolution, three distinct periods or types of domestic building following each other in regular and clearly-defined sequence, from rude and massive structures of stone and timber to carefully-constructed and artistically-designed mansions.

The first period of colonial architecture embraces the greater part of the seventeenth century. Numerous edifices of this period may still be seen in Providence and Newport, Rhode Island, as well as in the western portions of the State. In Newport County I may instance the Governor Henry Bull house, built in 1639, the Sueton Grant house, built about 1650, the Governor Coddington house, erected in 1647, and the "Captain Kid" house, so called, on Conanicut Island. These houses show all the peculiarities of the constructive science of their day, which aimed simply to attain solidity and protection from the elements. The chimneys and end-walls were generally built of stone, laid up as random rubble, with mortar composed of shell lime, sand, and gravel, and flakes of broken slate pounded fine. The sides of these buildings, and the ends above the line of roof-plate, were of frame construction, made of heavy oak timber, rudely squared, put together with treenails and boarded with oak, usually at an angle of forty-five degrees, thus making of every board a separate brace. This boarding was sometimes covered with coarse stucco, as on the Bull house, or with split shingles, as on the Governor Coddington house, put on with wrought nails.

"Whitehall," the home of Bishop Berkeley, and a group of old houses on Thames Street at Newport, may be said to represent the second period of our colonial architecture,--_i.e._, the first quarter of the eighteenth century. They are entirely of frame construction, covered over the boarding with thick clap-boards, with beaded edges, put on with wrought nails, and the roofs covered with split shingles of a better class than those previously used. In houses of this period brick began to take the place of stone for chimneys, and the gambrel roof--a form of construction whose history so far has eluded the researches of the student--seems to have originated in the colonies: it continued in favor for a hundred years or more, and gradually developed into a well-proportioned architectural structure, with richly-moulded cornice and well-designed dormers. It had many advantages: the framing was simple and strong, and the attic rooms possessed all the height and floor-space obtainable in the modern French roof, so called, while avoiding the disagreeable box-like appearance of the latter. The window-frames of these early eighteenth-century houses were made of plank, mortised and pinned together, the sills and caps being often moulded and a bead run around the inner edge of the frames. The sashes were heavy and glazed, with small squares of very inferior glass set in wide muntins.

In one of these old houses we find an attempt to modify the gambrel into the hipped roof, a type which became highly developed in the latter half of the eighteenth century. In the earlier examples this roof, instead of being truncated and hipped in all around, with a railing above the crown moulding, was simply hipped in on the lower part, being turned up at the ends, forming small gables. The dwellings of this class form a connecting-link between the second and third periods, which may be said to have commenced about 1730, when the growing commercial importance of the seaport towns and the rapid accumulation of wealth induced a more lavish and elegant style of living.