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English Neo-Classical Architecture by Damie Stillman Review by: David Cast The Art Bulletin, Vol. 72, No. 4 (Dec., 1990), pp. 664-667 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3045772 . Accessed: 15/06/2014 15:16 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Art Bulletin. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 62.122.76.60 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 15:16:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

English Neo-Classical Architectureby Damie Stillman

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English Neo-Classical Architecture by Damie StillmanReview by: David CastThe Art Bulletin, Vol. 72, No. 4 (Dec., 1990), pp. 664-667Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3045772 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 15:16

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The ArtBulletin.

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Page 2: English Neo-Classical Architectureby Damie Stillman

664 THE ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 1990 VOLUME LXXII NUMBER 4

early self-portraits. She sees them as reflections of his insecurity in the face of a fast-changing, unstable world - of a crisis of identity and an urge to escape from everyday reality. By the same token, it is the "everydayness" of the 1648 self-portrait that for her confirms its "authority" and "authenticity." What is missing here, however, is a serious consideration of the way in which acting enters into Rembrandt's sense of himself in his self-por- traits, despite her use of terms like "self-fashioning" and "the pro- tean self." Nor do her thematic chapter divisions help her to delve into how he could move so swiftly from one role to another or how they sometimes overlap. The closest she comes to a real an- swer is her suggestion that the early "expression studies" show him not so much acting a part as trying to experience for himself the emotions in his history paintings. Is this Rembrandt a method actor, absorbing himself in his roles? Certainly, she seems to value sincerity more than artifice. Yet it was surely the artifice, the play- ing, involved in this kind of acting that allowed him to invent so many different roles for himself, and it is only in these terms that we can legitimately speak of his proteanism. Although there may well be an element of escapism here, the sheer multiplicity of Rem- brandt's roles indicates an ability to separate his inner self from its outward manifestations.

This is just the understanding of selfhood as invention that runs through Renaissance thought, whether we look for it in strong, masquerading characters like Rosalind in As You Like It or in Castiglione's ideal courtier. In such figures, it is self-mastery and inner coherence that make for good acting. Castiglione in par- ticular, however, also stresses the social nature of the stage and the performance. Even as he distinguishes between the actor and his roles, he seeks to bring the inner and outer self into harmony in the interests of creating a coherent social image. It seems to me that what Rembrandt is chiefly emulating in the London self- portrait is the gentlemanly integration and integrity that he found in Titian's portrait and in his other model, Raphael's Portrait of Castiglione. Contrary to Chapman, there is nothing "pretentious" (p. 131) about this self-portrait. It is deeply serious and more fully resolved than any he had done up to that point. Nor is it true that he abandoned this formula in his later works. As she con- cedes in her epilogue, he used it again in his last Self-Portrait (Br.55) of 1669 in London; he also used it in the late self-portraits in Washington (Br.51) and Amsterdam (Br.59), as well as in por- traits of men who were not artists: Herman Doomer (Br.217), Nicolaes van Bambeeck (Br.218), and The Man with the Mag- nifying Glass (Br.326).

Rembrandt also continued to play fanciful roles in his later works, as in his self-portraits as Saint Paul (Br.59) and Zeuxis (Br.61). The Frick Self-Portrait (Br.50) belongs in this category too. Chapman herself shows that his costume here is not studio attire, but historical dress. The fact that similar clothes appear not only in his history scenes, but in portraits such as the Chats- worth Old Man (Br.266) of 1651, undercuts, however, her sug- gestion that he appears here as the "Prince of Painters." But what- ever his persona is, he clearly still found play-acting a profoundly meaningful way of articulating his character. Although the later self-portraits are deeper and more enigmatic than those of the 1630s, there is far too much continuity to justify the idea of a two-part Rembrandt. Interesting as they are, the 1648 etching and the other late "studio" self-portraits seem to represent more an expansion than a fundamental change in his vocabulary.

Chapman's last chapter is devoted to Rembrandt's biblical roles, and it is by far the strongest. The reason, of course, is that the roles he plays as a raiser of the Cross (Br.548), as the prodigal son with the whore (Br.30), or as Saint Paul (Br.59) can be clearly defined in terms of well-understood Christian meanings. To her

credit, she draws on a wide variety of sources and themes in in- terpreting these works. In focusing on Rembrandt's concern with penitence and humility, Chapman also develops a range of ideas that are the very opposite of the notion of the autonomous self and, in most respects, closer to the central meanings of his art as a whole. More important still, these themes introduce qualities of ambivalence, complexity, and irony into his self-portraits that make her interpretations far richer than in the more wooden, monologic approach that dominates earlier chapters. Given the incompatibility of these two views of Rembrandt's attitude to- ward himself, it is perhaps not surprising that she segregated this aspect of her subject at the end of the book; but it is a great pity. If she had tried to integrate the biblical self-portraits and the issues they raise into the main line of her argument, the whole character of the book would have changed - in my view, for the better.

DAVID R. SMITH

University of New Hampshire Durham, N.H. 03824-3538

DAMIE STILLMAN, English Neo-Classical Architecture, Lon- don, A. Zwemmer Ltd., 1988. Vol. I: 336 pp., 232 ills.; II: 312 pp., 158 ills. $295

Words, we know, are not things, but they are the names of things and, beyond that, as Samuel Johnson once put it, the signs of ideas. Stillman likes things and he likes certain kinds of words, and in this immensely detailed and scrupulous study, he is able to talk of many things and the many words that refer to things, both large and small, general and particular, that architecture and the record of architecture so often use. But necessarily, he is con- cerned also with the categories and ideas that have been used to lay out this history, however much he excuses himself for this language and the words that constitute it. His focus is on England, the first word of his title, "because that was where all the major figures (i.e., architects) and a great many of the minor ones had their offices and where the majority of the buildings were erected." He regrets that his volume is about architecture, rather than, say, building and he writes, "there is not as much as I should have liked on working-class buildings or vernacular ones. .. ." And he accepts that his subjects can all be called Neoclassical because, whatever changes took place in architecture in these years, there was still a "continuing appeal of classicism." It is characteristic of his modesty and meticulousness that Stillman offers these apol- ogies at the very beginning of his text. Yet it is also characteristic of the intellectual style of this book that he then passes on very quickly, leaving behind the question of the validity of categories that in fact many historians of the period now find difficult to accept. For what does the limitation to England mean when, as someone like W.C. Lehmann has shown recently in his book on Lord Kames, so much of what we take to be the intellectual force of the Enlightenment in Britain is the result of Scottish rather than English endeavors? And what of "neo-classical," which is found as a term of description only long after the period it is now taken to refer to7 And what, in the end, of the word "architecture," which may denote a particular kind of intellectual and theoretical program that seems separate from many of the social actions Still- man describes?

These are criticisms. Yet the record here of architecture between about 1750 and 1805, or of what Stillman calls "building types," houses, clubs, and so on, is immensely rich, a text of some 300,000 words, 407 plates, and 120 pages of footnotes and bibliographies; and this is something all students of the period will now use,

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whatever their particular interests. And the only disappointed readers will be those asking for something more sophisticated in its methods, or for a narrative that acknowledges more openly the moves it makes between words and things, or between words and thoughts, or between thoughts and all that Stillman calls the aesthetic, intellectual, social, economic, and religious context of architecture.

We might properly wonder, for example, about the term "neo- classical," the most unusual word Stillman uses. In the opening sentences, he notes that this word and its various cognates, "neo- classical" and "neo-classic," were employed only years after the fact and then, so far as the visual arts were concerned, only pe- joratively. Following Joseph Rykwert, who followed the Oxford English Dictionary, he reproduces the words of an anonymous writer in 1893 in the London Times who spoke of a work called The Sleep of the Gods, by the then prominent painter Arthur Hacker, as "needing a scholar" to make its style, which he calls neo-classicism, "even tolerable." This is interesting. The painting by Hacker was inspired by some highly passionate verses by Eliz- abeth Barrett - the poem's full title included the line "Evohe! Ah! Evohe! Ah! Pan is dead" - and its subject, if seemingly chaste, seems inescapably charged, to us post-Freudians, with what Jo- seph Kestner recently called an association of "sensuality, bes- tiality and earthiness." This was not, it happens, the first occasion the word "neo-classical" was used about art in a published source. In 1881, as David Irwin has noted, again following the Oxford English Dictionary, another anonymous writer, this time in the Athenaeum, described a painting by Poussin, the Saint John on Patmos, as being in the "neo-classic mode of design," and referred then to the masses of ruined architecture and the awkwardness, yet the nobility and solemnity in a work that was worthy of a master (i.e., Poussin), "whose genius" - and here is the usual if curious sting in the tail - "unfortunately adopted a scholastic instead of a scholarly mode. . 1. ."1 This seems closer to what we might consider the more usual account of Neoclassicism and closer, certainly, if only from the reference to architecture, to the way Stillman wants to employ the term. But then we might go back to Hacker and wonder if the description of his painting implies that an element of repression or control always lies within all Neoclassicism, and something also of nostalgia, pedantry, sol- emnity, or grandeur, if the description of the work by Poussin is typical. In French, the word was first used with regard to liter- ature by Baudelaire in 1861 of the writer Pierre du Pont; in Italian, first in 1898 by Giosue Carducci of the poets Monti, Foscolo, and Manzoni. In Spanish and German, the words "neuklassische" or "neo-classico" do not appear until very recently when, for ex- ample, it was at last felt necessary by historians of Spanish lit-

erature to distinguish between Cervantes and writers of a later moment like Montiano y Luyardo and Cadalso.2 What we may take from all this is a sense of the inflections of history, and the possibility that both Spain and Germany did not have so clearly marked a classical period to set against the idea of the late Neo- classical moment and the movements of language itself. In the late 19th century, England was the source of many similar new words, such as "neo-Latin" in 1850, "neo-Hellenic" in 1869, "neo- Romanticism" in 1882, and "neo-Gothic" in 1892.

Stillman invites us to this kind of cultural speculation, yet it is clearly the very kind of questioning that he eschews. Nor, in the end, does philosophy fare any better. In his opening pages, he refers to the record of the debate that took place in the later 18th century about the nature of architecture among writers like Lodoli and Laugier and, if more briefly, the now very familiar architects Etienne-Louis Boullke and Claude-Nicholas Ledoux. And he offers an account of the record of archaeology that was published by scholars like Richard Dalton, Robert Wood, James Dawkins, and, of course, James Stuart and Nicholas Revett. What Stillman says about the labors of all these varying commentators is reasonable enough, yet it is perfunctory. As another reviewer put it, these passages seem to be written as afterthoughts, despite their ap- pearance at the beginning of the book. Stillman's heart, it is clear, is in the buildings, and if he speaks of the other parts of the cul- tural context of these years, he does so, it seems, more out of duty than passion. By making this kind of history, is Stillman seriously suggesting something about the nature of his subject? Every text, however discrete, is persuasive. By the end of his his- tory, the reader, convinced by the accumulation of data, may indeed wonder if the history of this period of building is one of details, as Stillman implies, rather than one of ideas.

The argument, I think, can be carried further. It is, perhaps, a matter of both temperament and opportunity that Stillman wrote so undogmatic and practical a record. Yet he is right to keep to details, in light of the theory, and particularly the taste of the Continent that theory always brought with it to England. The Continental writers were known in England, and early on - even such comparatively minor figures as Ren Ouvard or Lambert ten Kate. Laugier's work was almost immediately translated into Eng- lish, and known and studied by architects as distinct from one another as Isaac Ware and James Adam and by clients like the Earl of Shelburne. But the attention given Laugier in England was always, as Stillman notes, less than rigorous in its reasoning. Soane, we believe, read Laugier early on in his career, and he openly admitted, for all his later doubts about giving this book to students, how much he sympathized with the call that Laugier made to the first principles of architecture. But when it came to

1 Since the description of this painting is complex and, so far as I know, generally unkown to modern scholarship, I think it worth presenting here:

The neo-classic, if not the Italian, mood of design is finely illustrated by N. Poussin's noteworthy picture, St. John of Patmos (cat. no. 167), an admirable example, although not on a large scale. It is unfortunate in hanging close to Rembrandts and Veroneses. Although the masses of ruined architecture in the foreground are awkwardly disposed, this work is noble, solemn and impressive, and worthy of a master whose genius lacked neither spontaneity nor activity, but unfortunately adopted a scholastic instead of a scholarly mode. There is great dignity in the vast gathering of cumuli over the still lake and these gigantic mountain ridges, over which the clouds seem slowly to trail, as if they passed to another world, while they throw portentous shadows behind them. The austere pathos of the subject is heightened by the still, dark- blue surface of a river which winds between rocky banks to the distant

lake, and by the gloom of the reflections of the rocks. The group of figures has so much sculpture-like dignity that it cannot fail to impress the observer. The massive form of the angel holding the book near St. John, who is seated among the ruins, is inspired by the noblest senti- ment. This picture belonged to Citizen Robit, and was valued by Mr. Bryan at 1,000 guineas for Sir Samuel Clarke. It was sold in 1801 with the Robit Collection.

"The Royal Academy (Sixth and Concluding Notice)," The Athenaeum, 19 February 1881, 207. For a modern bibliography on this painting, which is now in the Art Institute of Chicago, see A. Blunt, The Paintings of Nicolas Poussin: A Critical Catalogue, London, 1966, 59. 2 See R. Sebold, Descubrimiento y fronteras del neoclasicismo espaiiol, Madrid, 1985.

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666 THE ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 1990 VOLUME LXXII NUMBER 4

parts of architecture, like pedestals and pilasters, that Laugier did not approve of, Soane was willing to put theory aside and use these elements as he pleased, as at Pitzhanger, or the design for Praed's Bank, or the great inner court of the Bank of England. All architecture, we may say, is as much a matter of practice as of theory. The nature of the record Stillman lays out suggests that in England in the 18th century, theory was not really taken se- riously, or that it was so translated into a pattern of social think- ing that any questions of the place of reason or the idea of de- corum, so dear to writers on the Continent, reappeared in England as matters of what we can quite appropriately call gentlemanly propriety and social action.

Neoclassicism, to come back to our first troubling notion, may have its roots within the school of Lord Burlington, as Summerson had suggested and Emil Kaufman before him, but the arguments that constituted the theory of Neoclassicism in the 18th century were far more actively pursued in France or Italy or Germany than in England. And it was writers in those countries, rather than in England, who stretched the battles about the ancients and moderns or the Greeks and the Romans over many years and many volumes. What appeared in England in the 18th century was, on one hand, a discussion of aesthetics, and, on the other, a profusion of volumes of reports and examples of archaeology, some of which gave evidence for these discussions of the Greeks and the Romans or the ancients and the modems. What seemed to have been most important in England were not ideas about antiquity as such, but irredeemably social ideals, like the Grand Tour to Greece and Rome and the development of a taste for the commissioning of buildings that could then display all the new information and rules about art acquired abroad. One recalls Emerson's remark a century later about the English mind: that it turns every abstraction it can receive into a portable utensil.

Taste, then, as much as philosophical decorum, marked much of the art and architecture in England in the 18th century. And it may be, as Terry Eagleton seems to suggest in his recent book, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1989), that we should seek a po- litical or, perhaps more specifically, a social label for the archi- tecture of this period. Stillman acknowledges that as he consid- ered other titles for this book, he turned for a moment to G.E. Mingay and Asa Briggs and more recent historians like Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb, who have described the birth in 18th-century England of "the consumer society," words Locke had similarly used. Perhaps the Industrial Revolution is as important here as the Enlightenment, or certainly the growth, within the theories of economics, of an account that set the ben- efits of luxury against what had been spoken of so often as the moral utility of poverty. And certainly it was at this time that writers like Addison, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, and Sir Samuel Garth came to use the term "luxury" in the sense we give the word now, in place of the older word lussuria, and to think of it as a possible virtue, rather than an inevitable and despicable vice. We might try then to place architecture within this world and say that what appeared in the 18th century in Neoclassicism was a specific expression, or embodiment of certain of the ideals, of this new class. There were not to be any great, particular ex- amples of architecture; architecture was now building, after building, after building. And the display in all these many build- ings was, both literally and metaphorically, more often of the surface than of the substance, and more private than ever public. There were new materials: cast iron, or mathematical or rebate tiles, or those other forms of cement and artificial stones, like the famous "scagliola," that served so often to give all the surfaces they touched an appearance of what they were not. We might think then of various labels that could be used to identify this

work, the architecture of the new consumer class, or that of the first stages of the Industrial Revolution, or of what was so often called the Age of Improvement. But none of these titles satisfied Stillman. For if this was a new architecture, it was a style that, for all its novelty, was essentially based on the model of antiquity, redone and reordered perhaps, but classical still; it can be prop- erly called Neoclassical, once we know what this word can mean.

The record that Stillman details serves to explain this particular ideal, in practice and in procedure. All this architecture began, by his account, in Rome, "the most glorious place," so James Adam said, "in the Universal World." It was to Rome that so many ar- chitects went, and once there they studied and sketched and meas- ured all the models of ancient and modemrn architecture they could reach; and some of the results then turned into what Stillman calls fantasies, and some, in less enraptured moments, became prac- tical designs for palaces or government buildings or galleries. Few of these projects were built. But it was from imaginations sharp- ened and expanded by such apparent extremes, so Stillman ar- gues, that the first styles of architecture in the 1750s and 1760s were born, whether by architects like Robert Mylne or George Dance or Thomas Harrison. This is the beginning of the period of architecture that Stillman covers. The end, some sixty years later, is marked by a different model of architecture, that of "shape and surface, light and decoration," when at last, so it seems, the idea of simplicity could be enunciated and expressed as both a principle of nature - whatever Hume had said of that in the earlier years of the century - and as a model for art. This is the architecture that Summerson, comfortable with the older cate- gories, chose to call the second phase of Neoclassicism, the work of a generation looking, as he put it, more to Chambers than to Adam, but aiming at something different from both of them. This represented what we might also call the move from the Romans to the Greeks, from James Adam to Soane, or from the elegance of buildings like Osterley Park or Heaton Hall of the 1760s and 1770s to the plainness of Dodington Park or the constricted bulk- iness of the wing at Cairness House, Aberdeenshire, both of which seem to suggest, as Summerson put it, "an English" (or, we might add, a Scottish) "interpretation of the neo-classicism then in its first flowering in France .

Between this beginning and the end are ten chapters, on build- ings grouped by types or by programs: county seats, residences in towns, urban planning, interior design, public buildings, schools and universities, churches, and finally such pleasurable haunts as "clubs and coffee houses, taverns, and assembly rooms, baths and theatres." Each chapter begins with a summary of the social circumstances contributing to the development of these types. For the town houses, as an example, Stillman provides the social calendars of the aristocracy, moving from town to country and back again, and information about the growth of cities like Bath, Sheffield, Birmingham, Manchester, London, Edinburgh, Bristol, and Leith. He also offers a record of the buildings that serviced all the new demands of this new aristocracy. In the sec- tion on clubs, for example, there is a history of Boodle's and Brooks's, something on Adam's designs for the Ball and Concert Rooms at Bath, the new Assembly Room at Glasgow, and many other details. Occasionally, we may sense a certain repetition in these chapters, in form at least; and the remarks in the opening paragraphs are sometimes overshadowed by the abundant ar- chitectural details of the buildings themselves. Yet certainly, given the mass of details to be included, it makes more sense to cover this material by listing building types, rather than by talking of particular architects or by attempting a more synchronic account. But given the social and political changes taking place, we may wonder how the omissions distort this picture of a society, the

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omissions Stillman admits to, in the types of buildings he dis- cusses. There is nothing here on warehouses, for example; and the entries on factories are buried within the chapter on univers- ities and athenaeums. This is a curious evasion. To move to an obvious source, we look at Pevsner's writings about mill buildings and his illustrations of Samuel Oldnows's mill at Marple and the Masson Mill at Cromford. All that Stillman chose to reproduce is a view of Albion Mill, Blackfriars Bridge, as shown on fire in the picturesque plate in Ackerman's Microcosm of London, which is hardly a source as rigorous as those he uses for all the other buildings in this book. Yet what little Stillman does provide about mills and factories is clear and, so far as I could tell, based upon a thorough reading of the literature - all that has been written about the mills of West Yorkshire, for example, by historians like John Martin Robertson, Derek Lindstrom, and A.W. Skepton.

I said there is an evasion here, and I think it is an evasion that goes to the very core of this book. For all the changes taking place within England and within English society in all these years, the record Stillman sets out tells us very little about the response in building to what we might imagine a newly industrialized society would call for. In his comments on the mills at Cromford and Marple, Stillman notes the Palladian and Diocletian motifs on the facade of Mason Mill and the timber framing on the inside that allowed for the large spaces in which the new machines and the engines to power them could be placed. But by this account, there is very little that is new here. Perhaps, within the history of build- ing, there is always a lag between demand and supply, and cer- tainly the history of the shop, to cite one example, may suggest that it was not until the 1820s and the 1830s, or even until the 1860s if we think of Aspreys in Old Bond Street, that a new kind of design emerges to serve a form of commercial enterprise defined much earlier. We may wonder if the comparative skimpiness of the record of these newer forms - and Stillman admits his is a skimpy record - distorts what was going on in England in those years.

In this era, the church was displaced as the highest model of architecture, and Stillman's chapter on the ecclesiastical buildings of the later 18th century is appropriately thin, despite the interest of individual examples. But in his account, it is as though the church had merely been replaced by the country house as the great type to which all architecture should aspire. On the basis of Still- man's text and illustrations, we might conclude one of two things: either that the architecture itself did not immediately reflect the social changes of these years; or else that such a selection of ma- terial that we have here is merely a reflection of Stillman's par- ticular concerns and interests. If the first, then we might have the basis for a description of this whole style of architecture as a kind of social repression, however widely or loosely that word might be understood, with something of the kind of meaning that emerged from our first examination of the term Neoclassicism. If the second, then we may see it as the sign of a conservatism on the part of the author, and a conservatism that, while defensible enough, should be expressed more openly and explicitly.

It is clear that Stillman is most at home with the particulars of architectural practice, and he knows these as thoroughly as any historian working today. The study of the history of architecture of this period has flourished in both England and America in the last twenty years. And Stillman is among the scholars of this newer generation, much respected for his work ever since his first studies on Robert Adam were published, studies undertaken at Columbia with Rudolf Wittkower, the great scholar of English and Conti- nental architecture. Stillman's bibliography is a tally of the names of the scholars whose labors have made so much of this material

available, all of whom he magnanimously acknowledges - for example, John Harris, Sandra Blutman, Gervase Jackson-Stops, Dorothy Stroud, and many, many others. Given the bedrock of existing scholarship here for Stillman, the uses to which he puts it are, within limits, provocative and new. Notable, for example, are the chapter on the importance of Rome, the section on public buildings, and the account he gives of the fertility of invention and the influence of Robert Adam. The plates Stillman has as- sembled, whether those of sketches or projects for unfinished or demolished buildings, also tell their own valuable and varied story, reminding us of the vagaries of commissions and the hazards of survival. A photograph is a particular form of historical docu- ment, and I cannot resist noting some of the revealing details in Stillman's photographs. There is, for example, a wonderful plate of Boodle's that, to judge from the horse carriages in front, could date from the end of the last century; on the other page is one of Brooke's, a more modern photograph, but one that includes, in nearby buildings, a real estate agent's sign, as if to remind us of the threat of all the economic disruptions in London of the 1970s and 1980s. Or, against the Ionic columns of Castle Goring, we can see, in the photograph, two workmen's ladders, leaning non- chalantly against the solemn and grandiose architecture, as a symptom of the ever-present restoration of older structures. Or at the grim, blackened facade of All Saints, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, there is a record of the costs of such restoration, the sign for an appeal for ?25,000; or, to remind us of the transformation of older buildings, in the Billiard Room at Watton Wood, Hertfordshire, we can see a blackboard with French verbs spelled out, which tells us that the house is now a school and, moreover, one that still teaches foreign languages.

There is a lot here, as all the reviewers of this book have noted, and much that scholars will be able to use with profit. But it must be admitted that the text is not easy reading, the sentences being packed - perhaps too richly - with details and information that seem slightly unfocused. Stillman also has a tendency to let his clauses and phrases drift on without rhythm or climax. This is not a book to be read as a simple narrative; it invites browsing, and in its excellent index and footnotes, even burrowing. (The latter sometimes contain material of great moment; for example, an account of the term "mysterieuse" by Soane, and a note on the influence of France upon Sir William Chambers.) Stillman is a modest, generous scholar, and if at every moment this book reflects his modesty, which we must admire, and his distaste for historical generalizations, which we may admire less, it is also clear it reflects his love of the style and material of the buildings themselves, the details that make them what they are, the patterns and plans that they embody.

A word at the end on the price of the work, something that almost every reviewer noted. It is high, and sadly so, for this will probably serve to keep the books out of the hands of most work- ing scholars. But if we think of the mass of materials contained here, the range of the illustrations, and the impeccable care with which everything is printed and checked, the books are not ex- cessively priced. I just spent twelve dollars more than the cost of the publication having a part of the brake system on my 1981 Plymouth Reliant replaced. I accepted the price of the brake work without question, but complained for a moment about the price of these two luxurious volumes. Such are the economic imbal- ances in our society to which we have become accustomed.

DAVID CAST

Bryn Mawr College Bryn Mawr, Pa. 19010-2899

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