1862 and all that
Alexander Thomson and Scottish architects at the 1862 International Exhibition
As previously observed, Alexander Thomson’s Grecian Urn and Vase of All Nations, designed for Ferguson, Miller & Co., made it into the 1851 Great Exhibition (Ferguson, Miller won an award as a result). The success of the 1851 event, held in Hyde Park, London, led to similar exercises elsewhere in the United Kingdom, such as the 1853 Dublin exhibition where Thomson’s terracotta fountain, again for Ferguson, Miller, was first displayed, as well as overseas.
In 1862 (the year in which Ferguson, Miller were bought out by the Garkirk Fireclay Company), a new International Exhibition was staged in London’s South Kensington on a 24 1/2-acre site ‘purchased by the Commissioners of 1851 out of the surplus from the first International Exhibition’, fronting Prince Albert’s Road (now Queen’s Gate) to the west, Cromwell Road to the south and Exhibition Road to the east - essentially, the site where the Natural History Museum would later be built.
The Architectural section of the exhibition, in upper galleries located at the northern end of the Exhibition Road part of the building, contained some 650 items, primarily plans and drawings, with a smaller number of photographs and models.
Most of the decorative items on display - as illustrated by the Art Journal - can be best described as reflecting mid-Victorian decorative taste (Queen Victoria had been on the throne for twenty-five years at this point). For Francis Turner Palgrave, whose Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics had appeared the previous year, and who produced a guide to the Exhibition’s Fine Art Collections, Gothic architecture, for example, was
simply the one style which, by the circumstances of its development, has united in itself all the best constructive and the best ornamental forms of the world’s inventions in Architecture. From the lowliest offices of use to the loftiest majesty of loveliness, this noble art has shown herself equal to the occasion; unrestricted by varieties of climate, nay, finding in them only additional opportunities for beauty and for convenience; at once the most economical in means, the most varied in adaptabilities, the most intelligible and exquisite in results. It is no fine figure to say, that by ten thousand proofs Gothic has stamped itself on the fair face of Europe as the Architecture of Heaven, and the Architecture of Home. Man’s requirements in the province of building do not substantially vary ; they are amongst the things ‘that have been, and will be again.’ In this matter, then, on which side is Common Sense ? Why seek impossible new forms, or repeat styles which are bastard, or lifeless, or unpractical,—whilst men of like passions and blood with ourselves have solved the problem once, perfectly, and for ever?1
While many of the architectural plans and models on display were of historic structures of various styles, as well as newer buildings, often in the Gothic idiom, but not exclusively.
The Committee
Most of the Architectural Committee responsible for selecting the entries were architects, although the Chairman was Alexander James Beresford Beresford Hope [the second ‘Beresford’ arising as a result of his marriage), author and Conservative politician, who three years later would become President of the Royal Institute of British Architects.
Arthur Ashpitel (1807-1869) was a prolific author and architect, previously in partnership but now working on his own. At this point, he had been involved in various church restorations, and would go on to design the ornament cast on the Westminster Bell, ‘Big Ben’. In a distant Thomson connection, he had also produced a revised edition of Peter Nicholson’s Carpenter’s New Guide.
James Bell (1829-1883), the youngest member of the Committee, was an Irish architect and civil engineer, supporting Charles Lanyon on work at the Belfast Lunatic Asylum and National Gallery of Ireland.
Professor Thomas Leverton Donaldson (1795-1885) was a co-founder and sometime President of the Institute of British Architects (soon to become the RIBA). A pioneer of the academic study of architecture, in 1841 he became the first Professor of Architecture at University College London, a post he retained until 1865.
The Scottish architectural historian James Fergusson (1808-1886) was the author of a two-volume Illustrated Handbook of Architecture of which Thomson would have been aware and, according to Gavin Stamp, may have influenced Thomson’s ideas about the instability of the arch as a building form.
Professor Thomas Hayter Lewis (1818-1898) was an architect and designer, soon to replace Donaldson as Professor of Architecture at University College London
George Gilbert Scott, RA (1811-1878), was a prolific proponent of Gothic architecture, but his 1858 Gothic scheme for the new Foreign and India Offices had been overridden by Palmerston (as well as being objected to in Parliament by William Tite, another member of the Committee). It was now being constructed using an Italianate design.
Sydney Smirke, RA (1797-1877) had been an architect for more than thirty years, his most recent work being the circular Reading Room for the British Museum.
William Tite, MP, FRS (1798-1873) was at the time President of the Institute of British Architects, whose active life as an architect was coming to an end. He had been responsible for rebuilding the Royal Exchange in London but had also designed many railway stations, being responsible for stations served by the Caledonian and Scottish Central Railways, including Carlisle, Dunblane, Lancaster and Perth, as well as various stations in and around London.
Matthew Digby Wyatt (1820-1877) was a British architect and art historian who had been Secretary of the Great Exhibition and of the IBA, Surveyor of the East India Company and would become the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge. He, too, had had a run-in with Scott over his Foreign and India Office plans: his view was that both jobs were too much for one man. He visited Scott, who immediately split the job (and the associated fees), with Scott having ‘general command of the external design’ of the India Office and Wyatt having ‘more especial direction of the interior’.
The works on display
The bulk of what was shown involved country houses, churches, commercial buildings, clubhouses and hotels, government and municipal buildings, courts and libraries, as well as civil engineering works, often in London but also Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester, among others, Many were of recent design, some historic, some reflected successful (or presumably unsuccessful) competition entries.
Naturally enough, members of the Committee, as practising or previously practising architects, took the opportunity to claim space among the items on show:
Professor Fergusson showed the Entrance Front and Garden Front for a ‘Design for a National Palace of the Fine Arts, as well as the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, ‘Restored according to recent discoveries’.
George Gilbert Scott and Herbert Williams together showed the ‘Interior of St Michael’s, Corkhill’, where they had undertaken ‘a lavish scheme of embellishment’. In his own right, there were thirteen Scott plans and drawings, three relating to ‘New Government Offices’ (presumably not his rejected 1858 Gothic designs for the Foreign and India Offices). There were few photographs on display, but Scott showed ‘Photographs, illustrating the Details of Kelham Hall’.
The Wyatt family were well represented: as the Committee member closely connected to the previous exhibition, Digby Wyatt exhibited 28 plans and drawings, including three interiors of rooms from the 1851 Exhibition (his elder brother, Thomas Henry Wyatt, got eight of his own).
William Tite was more modest, exhibiting only ‘Works and designs of Inigo Jones’, while Ashpitel exhibited six works, and Professor Donaldson three.
There were eight entries from the recently deceased Charles Barry (1795-1860), (whose designs Tite had preferred for the Foreign and India Offices task), presumably submitted by his architect sons; three related to Government buildings in Westminster, as well as ‘The River Facade of the New Palace, Westminster’.
The architect Owen Jones (1809-1874) was the most prolific of the other architects represented, with sixteen plans and drawings, many of them interiors, including the ‘Design for the Decoration of the Great Exhibition Building, 1862’, as well as an exterior of the Crystal Palace as rebuilt at Sydenham and the café there. Captain Francis Fowke, who designed the 1862 building, also exhibited ‘Interior of the Great Music Hall, originally proposed for the International Exhibition, 1862’ as a kind of ‘What might have been’ image. The Irish architectural partnership of Edward Welby Pugin and George C Ashlin had only begun two years before, but they still managed half a dozen entries (presumably encouraged by James Bell): all but one were of churches.
The Scottish contribution
Of the Scottish-themed works on show, many were exterior views of historic castles and church buildings, such as those of William Gilbee Habershon and Alfred Robert Pite, although their practice was based in London and Newport, Monmouthshire.
For Scots architects, churches were a popular subject: Campbell Douglas & Stevenson exhibited six plans and drawings of five Glasgow churches, Kelvinside, Macdonald Testimonial, Campsie Free, Bathgate Church, Broomielaw Free, as well as Trinity Presbyterian in Hampstead, and one private house, ‘Auchterlonie House, Loch Lomond’. James Salmon offered two views of Paisley Abbey (one as is, one ‘Restored’), while from Glasgow, there was John Burnet’s now-demolished Elgin Place Church and John Honeyman’s Free Church (it is unclear which particular church this was). There was also an ‘Interior of St Mary’s Church, Lanark’, from the London-based George Goldie.
Banks and public buildings were also prominent: John Gibson’s ‘National Bank of Scotland, Glasgow’ (now relocated as Langside Halls), Robert Matheson’s ‘New General Post-Office at Edinburgh’, David Rhind’s Commercial Bank of Scotland buildings in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and Peddie & Kinnear’s ‘Interior of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Edinburgh’. William Hardie Hay contributed a design for a ‘National Monument in Edinburgh’, David Bryce Junior the ‘Star Hotel, Edinburgh’, and David Cousin an interior of a classroom for teaching the Theory of Music at the University of Edinburgh (which became the Reid School of Music Classroom).
William Henry Playfair had a ‘Design for a Monument’ and another for a country house. David Paton Low showed a complex drawing demonstrating different architectural styles: ‘Cosmical Development of Architecture - Classic versus Gothic’2.
‘J Honeyman’ (presumably John Honeyman) is also listed as providing a ‘Design for the Houses of Parliament in Sydney’, although this does not appear among the works and designs attributed to him in the Dictionary of Scottish Architects.
In another Thomson connection, the unrelated James Thomson provided ‘The New Glasgow College (as designed by the late John Baird)’, presumably the third design for the planned but unbuilt College at Woodlands, which Thomson himself may have been involved in drafting. As a member of the 1862 selection committee, this would probably have been the first time George Gilbert Scott had seen Baird’s design with its two quadrangles, itself drawing on the old College buildings in High Street, and a feature Scott would reflect two years later when given the commission for the new university at Gilmorehill.
Thomson’s contribution
The partnership of A. & G. Thomson had eight designs on display, collectively listed in the Catalogue as ‘Designs for Buildings of various kinds’. It is possible that these reflected both domestic, commercial and religious work, but the use of the terms ‘buildings’ suggests these were not drawings of pottery, furniture, funerary monuments or obelisks, such as the one attributed to Thomson as his design for the Albert Memorial.
There were also three photographic views: of St Vincent Street Church, Caledonia Road Church and ‘a Suburban Villa’. It is possible that the image of St Vincent Street Church was the one shown below:
The image above, by Thomas Annan, is normally dated 1859, but this must be wrong: livery keeper James Sudden only first appears in ‘St. Vincent lane, off Bothwell street’ in the 1861-2 Glasgow Post Office Directory, and seems unlikely to have been there unrecorded in the two previous years (the Directory was published on 4th June that year3).
Annan was probably also the source for the photograph of the Caledonia Road Church, in which case the image used is likely to have been the 1859 one below.
Clearly, we cannot know the ‘Suburban villa’ illustrated; of the individual Annan images held by the Mitchell Library, for example, none match Thomson’s known work. Of the other plans, they might have been any of the near-twenty known marine villas built to date in Blairmore, Clynder, Cove, Helensburgh, Kilcreggan and Rothesay, or the fifteen villas in Bothwell and Glasgow. Holmwood seems a likely example. It seems unlikely that any of his tenements would have featured, with the possible exception of Queen’s Park Terrace, given its size and the unfamiliarity of most exhibition visitors to Glasgow’s tenemental housing style. Of his commercial output, you might expect Gordon Street and the Cairney Building on Bath Street, and possibly drawings of the initial or final Howard Street/Dixon Street warehouse, or less likely the West Nile Street warehouse.
Blackie’s Villa and Cottage Architecture would not be published until 1871, but it is possible that some of the plans reproduced there might have been shown a decade before at the Exhibition in an earlier form.
Francis Turner Palgrave, Handbook to the Fine Art Collections in the International Exhibition of 1862, London, 1962. In the section on Sculpture, Palgrave praised the sculptor Thomas Woolner while denigrating others, especially Woolner's main rival Carlo Marochetti. When it was pointed out Palgrave and Woolner shared a home, Palgrave was forced to withdraw the catalogue.
A somewhat smudgy version of this appears as the frontispiece in British Architect, Vol. 1, 1874
Glasgow Sentinel, 1 Jun 1861