CONTEXT 181 : SEPTEMBER 2024 51 fringe locations such as by the seaside. In a telling comparison, he points out that FRS Yorke in his book on The Modern House in England (1937) Architectural Press, London, could choose only 49 houses to describe at a time when more than four million new homes had been built in the period between the two world wars. As one would expect from Gavin Stamp, this is a provocative as well as a stimulating book. He has his heroes, some of whom he has written about before. Sir Edwin Lutyens and Sir Giles Gilbert Scott are duly praised, but he also includes less well-known architects like Arthur Shoosmith. There are villains, too, including Sir Herbert Baker, castigated for mutilating Soane’s Bank of England. Stamp’s conclusions are supported by extensive quotations from the literature of the period and are lavishly illustrated by excellent photographs of examples from Britain and abroad. The architecture of Scotland, Ireland and Wales is given equal space with that of England, and he has diligently credited the names of the architects who were responsible. Rosemary Hill’s helpful foreword emphasises the book’s value to an understanding of twentieth-century history in a rapidly changing world. It can be thoroughly recommended as a fitting tribute to someone whose contribution to the conservation movement in this country continues to be appreciated. Malcolm Airs, past president of the IHBC A continuing tradition British Architectural Sculpture 1851–1951 John Stewart, Lund Humphries, 2024, 208 pages, 151 colour and black-and-white illustrations, hardback, ISBN 978 1 848226 65 4, £45 The subject of this well-produced and beautifully illustrated survey is the rich heritage of decorative and figurative sculpture adorning British architecture. Some of the works described have been covered in pioneering books about 19th-century sculpture by Susan Beattie and Benedict Read, and tangentially in books about architecture; but this is the first to focus purely on architectural sculpture for its own sake. Although Stewart has not written a catalogue or gazetteer (probably an impossible task given the sheer amount of sculpture on British buildings), simply by amassing in one book so many important examples, he has saved us a lot of shoe leather. Stewart begins in 1851, but this is not an especially important date for architectural sculpture. For the real beginning of his story, he has to go back to the 1840s with the new Palace of Westminster and its vast amount of architectural ornament – capitals, bosses, gargoyles, heraldic achievements and statues – proliferating all over the building, setting the pattern for secular buildings of the gothic revival (churches are all but absent from the book). In the following chapters Stewart describes a succession of major civic and commercial buildings, and the sculptures that adorn them. Up to the late 1870s and early 80s there was little collaboration between architects and fineart sculptors, whose principal output was freestanding pieces such as statues, busts and ‘ideal’ subjects (mythology, allegory and history). Architectural sculpture was produced by firms of masons such as Farmer and Brindley, or Thomas Earp. Stewart also draws attention to the work of less familiar firms, such as Richard Lockwood Boulton and Sons of Birmingham, J and G Mossman of Glasgow, and Robert Mawer of Leeds; of particular interest in today’s art-historical climate is Mawer’s wife, Catherine, a skilled stone carver, whose work can be seen at Leeds Town Hall. Another welcome feature of the book is the technical material about the processes of making. Stewart explains, for example, that architects such as Barry or Burges provided sketches from which skilled craftsmen made clay models; plaster casts were then made and given to the stonecarvers to copy. It is not clear how much freedom was given to the carvers, but they had to work within an idiom closely defined by the architects. This changed completely in the late Victorian period with the coincidence of two movements: first, the New Sculpture, when a new generation of fine-art sculptors turned away from the rigid constraints of neoclassicism, and adopted richer and more realistic styles; and, second, the arts-and-crafts movement, which promoted the unity of the arts, seeking to bring together practitioners of the different art forms as equals. Stewart instances the formation of the Art Workers Guild (1884) as a key moment: its members included painters, architects, designers, sculptors and craftsmen. The new tone was set by the Institute of Chartered Accountants Hall, a baroque design by John Belcher, who gave artistic freedom to his sculptors, including Hamo Thornycroft and Harry Bates. Architects of the late Victorian and Edwardian baroque, and of the beaux-arts buildings that followed, collaborated with talented sculptors such as FW Pomeroy, William Goscombe John, Alfred Drury and George Frampton,
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