8. Eighteenth-Century Historicism and the First Gothic Revival

2019 ◽  
pp. 190-213
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Gothic Revival

Scottish Gothic Drama

2017 ◽  
pp. 59-74
Author(s):  
Barbara A. E. Bell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Effects ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Performance Culture ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
The Way

Scottish theatre, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, has been characterised by a distinctive performance culture that values anti-illusionist techniques, breaking the fourth wall, music and song, strongly physical acting styles and striking visual effects. These were accepted traits of the Georgian theatre as a whole; however, they endured in Scotland through the music hall and pantomime traditions, when late nineteenth-century Western theatre was focused on realism/naturalism. Their importance to the search for a distinctive Scottish Gothic Drama lies in the way that the conditions of the Scottish theatre during the Gothic Revival valued these skills and effects. That theatre was heavily constricted in what it could play by censorship from London and writers were cautious in their approach to ‘national’ topics. At the same time a good deal of work portraying Scotland as an inherently Gothic setting was imported onto Scottish stages.

A. J. Davis’s Belmead

2012 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-167
Author(s):  
Daniel Bluestone
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
Agricultural Practices ◽  
Agricultural System ◽  
Cultural Meaning ◽  
James River ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Classical Architecture ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Slave Quarters

In 1845 Philip St. George Cocke commissioned Alexander Jackson Davis to design a Gothic revival villa for Belmead. In doing so he radically departed from the tradition of Palladian and classical architecture that had characterized elite Virginia plantations since the mid-eighteenth century. In A. J. Davis’s Belmead: Picturesque Aesthetics in the Land of Slavery, Daniel Bluestone argues that a Davis design resonated differently on the banks of the James River than on the banks of the Hudson. The appeal of Davis’s design lay in its sensitivity to the reciprocity between buildings and landscape, highlighting Cocke’s advocacy of greater stewardship of the land in the place of generations of ruinous agricultural practices. Beyond his villa and his land, Cocke commissioned Davis to design Belmead’s slave quarters. This was an attempt to harmonize himself with his slaves and the nation with an agricultural system based upon chattel slavery rather than yeomen farmers. This essay encourages us to look beyond the universals that often frame architectural history discussions of picturesque aesthetics to situate picturesque designs more precisely within a place-centered context of client vision and socio-cultural meaning.

scholarly journals Nineveh sails for the New World: Assyria envisioned by nineteenth-century America

Iraq ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 243-256
Author(s):  
Steven W. Holloway
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Historical Representation ◽  
Sir Isaac Newton ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Museum Exhibits ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Revival Movement

In order to understand the unique reception of ancient Assyria in nineteenth-century America, it is necessary to describe the British public's own reception of the earliest British Museum exhibits, together with the marketing of publications of Layard and others. And, in order to grasp something of both Britain's and America's keen fascination with the earliest images of Assyria, I must introduce you briefly to the changing perceptions and tastes in admissible historical representation that, I believe, drove this fascination.The British public's breathless enthusiasm for the monuments from Bible lands had radical origins in English soil. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiquarians surveyed, sketched and wove theories about the prehistoric relics that dot the English landscape, occasionally linking them with a mythical Christian past. William Stukeley, for example, student and first biographer of Sir Isaac Newton, made something of a career out of surveying Avebury and Stonehenge, in an early eighteenth-century quest for evidence that could link the Britons of Celtic fame with the peoples and the received timeline of the Bible. By the early nineteenth century, the Gothic Revival movement had begun in earnest. Its proponents saw this project as a moral mainstay in the revitalization of English society and culture. English prehistoric and medieval monuments would be measured, drawn, catalogued, published, and ultimately by so doing, laid at the feet of the British public. The Napoleonic wars accelerated this movement, for Continental sightseeing was impossible, so the classic Grand Tour evaporated down to an insular walking tour. This of course fuelled the sense of British national destiny:Works on topography… tend to make us better acquainte d with every thing which exists in our native land, and are therefore conducive to the progress of real knowledge, to the diffusion of rational patriotism, and to virtuous sentiments and propensities …

Gothic Antiquity

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dale Townshend
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
Gothic Literature ◽  
Gothic Architecture ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Selection Of

This book seeks to provide the first sustained scholarly account of the relationship between Gothic architecture and Gothic literature (fiction, poetry, drama) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although the literature/architecture relation is a topic that has long preoccupied scholars of the literary Gothic, there remains no monograph-length study of the intriguing interactions between these two aesthetic forms. Equally, Gothic literature has received only cursory treatment in art-historical accounts of the early Gothic Revival in architecture, interiors, and design. Addressing this gap in scholarship, Gothic Antiquity seeks to situate Gothic writing in relation to the Gothic architectural theories, aesthetics, and practices with which it was contemporary, providing closely historicized readings of a wide selection of texts. In turn, it shows how these architectural debates responded to, and were shaped by, what we have since come to identify as the literary Gothic mode. In both its ‘survivalist’ and ‘revivalist’ forms, the architecture of the Middle Ages in the long eighteenth century was much more than a matter of style. Incarnating the memory of a vanished ‘Gothic’ age in the enlightened present, Gothic architecture, whether ruined or complete, prompted imaginative reconstructions of the nation’s past—a notable ‘visionary’ turn in which Gothic writers, architects, and antiquaries enthusiastically participated. Through initiating a series of dialogues between Gothic literature, architectural history, and the antiquarian interest in the material remains of the Gothic past, the book argues that these discrete yet intimately related approaches to vernacular antiquity are most fruitfully read in relation to one another.

Battle of the Styles? Classical and Gothic Architecture in Seventeenth-Century North-East England

2012 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 79-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Pears
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Gothic Architecture ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Classical Architecture ◽  
North East ◽  
Architectural Styles ◽  
Classical Style ◽  
British Architecture

Research over the last twenty years into seventeenth-century elite British architecture has questioned the view that Classical designs were the preserve of a narrow group of royal and aristocratic patrons at the Stuart court, and also that Inigo Jones was a ‘lonely genius’ misunderstood in his own lifetime but prophesizing the true Classicism that was to bloom in the eighteenth century.The role of patrons in defining architectural styles has also been analysed, and it has been noted that Classicism was not the only style they favoured. For earlier historians, a perception that Classical architecture was an advance upon the Gothic style of medieval English buildings led to discussions of ‘Gothic survival’ or ‘Gothic revival’ and of a ‘Battle of the Styles’ in sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings, with such patrons as Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676), who commissioned and renovated buildings in Gothic style, being viewed as a ‘curiosity’ for not employing Classical style.

Serious Gothic and ‘doing the Ancient Buildings’: Batty Langley's Ancient Architecture and ‘Principal Geometric Elevations’

2014 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 141-173
Author(s):  
Peter Lindfield
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Classical Architecture ◽  
Architectural Treatises ◽  
Pattern Books

Batty Langley (1696-1751) is one of the most familiar and generally infamous figures of Britain's eighteenth-century Gothic Revival (Fig. 1). Following his father, he trained as a gardener and was one of the early promoters of the irregular style that prefigured William Hogarth's ‘line of beauty’. Langley's interest, however, turned to architecture and he produced numerous architectural treatises and pattern books, the majority of which were concerned with Classical architecture. This was a sensible decision since, as Eileen Harris and Nicholas Savage observe, ‘Langley had much to gain by concentrating his publishing activities on architecture, for which there was a considerably larger, more diversified, and less discriminating market.’ His most well-known publication, however, is concerned with the Gothic: Ancient Architecture: Restored, and Improved by a Great Variety of Grand and Useful Designs, Entirely New in the Gothick Mode (1741-42).

‘Proceeding like Guy Faux’: the Antiquarian Investigation of St Stephen's Chapel Westminster, 1790–1837

2016 ◽  
Vol 59 ◽  
pp. 253-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Hill
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Modern Idea ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Changing Attitudes

AbstractSt Stephen's Chapel Westminster is one of Europe's great lost buildings. An elaborate palatine chapel, work on it began in 1292 and continued until at least 1363. After 1546 it became the House of Commons and was so obscured by successive alterations that the original building had passed out of living memory by the late eighteenth century. It was then that it attracted the interest of a number of antiquaries who recorded it in the years up to and after the fire of 1834. In 1837 it was demolished. The antiquaries’ accounts provide the only records of the chapel's appearance and construction and have been much used in studies of the medieval building. This article, however, considers them as a body of work in their own right, one that casts light not only on St Stephen's but on the changing attitudes of the Romantic age towards history and the medieval past in the years which saw the transformation of the Gothic Revival and the birth of the modern idea of conservation.

The Pre-Raphaelites and the “Mood of the Cloister”

1980 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 45-55
Author(s):  
Herbert Sussman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Thomas Carlyle ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Large Measure ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Pre Raphaelites

In his classic study of the Gothic revival, Kenneth Clark describes the transformation of the Gothic from its eighteenth-century associations with the non-rational, the non-civilized, and the mysterious into the sacramental Gothic created in large measure by Pugin and Ruskin. This transformation of medievalism continued through the nineteenth century. By the 1860s, sacramental Gothic had been subverted, changed into what Walter Pater calls in his essay “Aesthetic Poetry” a “profounder medievalism,” a medievalism that is closer in sensibility and artistic form to the contemporaneous Decadent movement on the Continent, to the work of Baudelaire and of Poe. This transformation can be illustrated in the sharp changes in the use of one of the most important signs of Victorian medievalism, the monastic or cloistered life, from the early Victorian writings of Thomas Carlyle, to the work of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and through Dante Gabriel Rossetti's watercolors of the late 1850s and William Morris's Defence of Guenevere volume of 1858, the original subject of Pater's essay.

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