THE GEORGIAN ARCHITECT MOST IN VOGUE

Michael Dunne examines the work of James Gibbs, the designer of many famous buildings whose name is surprisingly little known today.

My story begins with seeing a tourist bus in Piccadilly. On its side were three roundels of well-known buildings: one showed St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square; another, King’s College Chapel flanked by the Fellows’ Building in Cambridge; while the third image was of the Radcliffe Camera, today’s visual shorthand for the University of Oxford. As a Londoner I had known St Martin’s since boyhood; as an undergraduate I came to love the Camera; later still I became familiar with King’s Fellows’ Building.

By now, those who know Cambridge will have guessed what links these three edifices. The clue lies in the other name for the Fellows’ Building: the Gibbs’ Building. For all three icons of London, Oxford and Cambridge were designed by James Gibbs between the 1720s and 1740s.

Who was James Gibbs? The London Library’s catalogues provide various ways of researching the man and his work, directing the inquirer to different shelf-marks: Art & Architecture; Biography & Biographical Collections; and Topography, for the three cities mentioned. In my searches I came across a folio-size compendium by George Henry Birch, London Churches of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries (1896), illustrating some ‘Remarkable Ecclesiastical Buildings’ erected in London by a quartet of British architects. The four architects discussed were Inigo Jones, Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor – and James Gibbs.

The lives of these four men overlapped. Jones, born in 1573, died in 1652, 20 years after the birth of Wren in 1632. Hawksmoor (1662–1736), Wren’s star apprentice, was Gibbs’s senior by 20 years, Gibbs himself being born in

1682 and dying in 1754. Between them the four spanned almost two centuries, and if they were known only for churchbuilding in London, their reputations would be secure. There were other famous architectural contemporaries of Wren, among them Colen Campbell and Richard Boyle, the latter better known as the Lord Burlington memorialised in the eponymous House in Piccadilly. Yet even with the addition of these two other architects there is a fair chance that Gibbs will remain the least recognised.

Archival material tells us little about Gibbs’s early life. Born and formally educated in Aberdeen, in his late teens and early twenties he travelled extensively in Europe before entering the Pontifical Scots College in Rome to train as a missionary for the Catholic church, only to leave the Jesuit institution within a year to concentrate on architecture, studying under Carlo Fontana, the man of the Baroque moment and architect to Pope Clement XI. By 1709 Gibbs was back in Britain, working for wealthy patrons both in his native Scotland and in England. But the great professional breakthrough came when Gibbs was over 30. In 1713 he was appointed one of two surveyors to serve the Commissioners for Building Fifty New Churches in London. Gibbs’s first public contribution to this 1711 parliamentary blending of High Church Anglicanism and Tory politics was designing St Maryle-Strand. The resulting church was a structure spatially determined by the confines of its cramped and noisy setting opposite the earlier, mid-sixteenthcentury Somerset House, yet so openly Roman, even Romish, in its external and internal aspects that it prompted sectarian censure and led to Gibbs’s removal from his surveyorship in 1715. Gibbs deplored the ‘false and scandalous’ reports of himself as a ‘disaffected … Papest [sic]’ – slanders which translated into the anonymous denunciation in Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus (3 vols., 1715–25) of the ‘affected and licentious forms’ characteristic of Italian Baroque in general and Fontana in particular – it being obvious to the knowledgeable that Campbell’s real target was Gibbs.

St Mary-le-Strand was consecrated in 1723, a decade after its foundation. In the interval Gibbs had established such a reputation that he was already being touted to build the proposed new library for the University of Oxford. In the later and barbed judgment of Horace Walpole, the Gothic fan of Strawberry Hill fame, Gibbs was then ‘the architect most in vogue’ . Though the major stylistic influences on Gibbs were absorbed during his youthful period in Italy, contemporary Italy found its way into his work through the decorative brilliance of the stuccatori (ornamental plasterers) Giuseppe Artari and Giovanni Bagutti. During the 1720s work was begun on the Fellows’ Building, part of an overall plan to reshape King’s Front Court with a complementary south range facing the Chapel, the building which Gibbs described as the ‘finest’ in the ‘Gothick Taste’ he had ever seen. Though this particular project in collegiate planning failed through lack of funds, Gibbs was commissioned to design a central building for the university. This is the magnificent Senate House (completed 1730), whose elevations of giant attached fluted Corinthian columns and complementary plain pilasters recall the work of both Jones and Wren, while the spacious interior shows the artistry of Artari and Bagutti, in Gibbs’s view ‘the best fretworkers that ever came to England’ . Their work in the Senate House is widely considered to be one of the finest examples of Rococo plastering in England.

But what of the three buildings depicted on the side of the tourist bus? The Fellows’ Building was commissioned to provide substantial living and administrative space for King’s, but not at aesthetic cost to the Chapel. Gibbs’s solution was to create, at right angles to the Chapel’s south-west corner, a building four-fifths the length of the Chapel and of three full storeys, topped with a signature parapet. Architectural deference to the Chapel meant that this parapet intersects visually with the transom of the Chapel’s renowned West Window and the middle horizontal of the south face, where the 12 buttressed bays of superlative stained glass remain in full view across Front Court. As to ‘style’ , or historical echoes, the rusticated entrance-level basement of the Gibbs’ Building and the twostorey-high and pedimented central gateway suggest the monumentality of Italian Renaissance palazzo architecture, while the fenestration and detail reflect the simplicity of Antonio Palladio, whose interpreted work emerged contemporaneously with Campbell and Burlington, the latter perhaps best known for Chiswick House, the Veneto transplanted to West London.

St Martin-in-the-Fields and the Radcliffe Camera display more aspects of Gibbs’s eclectic yet compositional genius. The church’s Corinthian columned portico recalls Graeco-Roman temple-building, and the distinctive Wren-like tower-plus-steeple in six contrasting and diminishing stages forms the contemporary adaptation of the Gothic spire. The balustraded parapet surmounting the south and north flanks is typical of Gibbs, and it is Gibbs who is recorded in the term for the alternating blocks to the fenestration along the side walls of St Martin’s, ‘the ‘Gibbs surround’ . The interior of St Martin’s reproduces the external Corinthian verticality. Inside, however, the eight slender columns framing the aisle are raised on shoulder-height rectangular pedestals and carry dosseret entablatures at the top of the columns (another Wren feature), from which spring both semi-circular arches laterally and to the external walls and an elliptical vault to the nave. The result gives full visual play to the panelled ceiling executed by Artari and Bagutti, plasterwork which has won correspondingly lavish praise from architectural scholars. The transition from the broad aisle to the narrow sanctuary is signified by gallery-level boxes for royal and prestigious worshippers to see and be seen – a success, to judge from contemporary accounts of this extremely fashionable religious venue. Closing the sanctuary and completing the optical and liturgical journey is a Serlian East Window, a Palladian motif which Gibbs referred to as a ‘Venetian’ window.

British visitors to St Martin’s may not be aware of the architectural influence of this landmark church overseas, particularly in what would become the United States, with fine examples in Savannah, Charleston, Philadelphia, New York, New Haven, Providence and Boston. According to the cataloguers of the Royal Institute of British Architects, St Martin’s has exerted the greatest structural influence of any English Protestant church, an assertion made without irony regarding the legacy of this practising, if very discreet, Scottish Roman Catholic. Whether built mainly in stone or in wood, numerous churches throughout North America reproduced the combination of temple portico, expansive nave and towerplus-steeple, modelling promoted by Gibbs himself, whose Book of Architecture with 150 plates first appeared in 1728 and served for over a century as a primer for both amateur builders and professional architects.

Today’s St Martin’s was not Gibbs’s first design. That had been for a round, domed church with a portico entrance, an Italianate form ultimately derived from the Pantheon in Rome. But the scale and cost deterred the parish commissioners. Instead Oxford was given the Radcliffe Camera, the circular building designed by Gibbs, and the first so shaped to serve as a library in Britain. Named to honour the library’s ‘Munificent Founder’ (benefactor), Dr John Radcliffe, and built between 1737 and 1747, the Camera is set in Nicholas Hawksmoor’s ‘Great Piazza’ , with collegiate and university buildings by him and Wren close by. Indeed Gibbs drew upon an earlier scheme of Hawksmoor’s for a library, and fashioned four distinct storeys beginning at ground level with a ‘Rustick Basement’ (a ‘regular Polygon of sixteen Sides’) supporting the main rotunda, then a superimposed drum itself surmounted by a lead-covered dome topped by a domed lantern. The two upper stages of drum and prominently ribbed dome above the balustraded parapet are articulated with sweeping buttresses suggesting Venice rather than Rome, reminiscent of Baldassare Longhena’s Santa Maria della Salute (completed 1680s) at the eastern entrance to the Grand Canal. The eight ground-level large pedimented openings (glazed early in the 1860s) are interspersed with smaller round-headed niches, the latitudinal contrast paralleled on the second and taller level by comparable spaces between giant paired Corinthian columns framing alternating windows and blind surfaces in the main body of the building.

At the base there is an open undercroft, Gibbs’s ‘arched Stone-Porch’ , a ground-level feature in earlier rectangular libraries such as the one by Wren in Trinity College, Cambridge. This former open basement of the Camera has been transformed into an ancillary reading room, allowing an appreciation of its superb arcaded structure and restrained decoration, notably the coffered domed ceiling. Overall, the heavily rusticated groundlevel polygon anchors the paradoxical lightness above of the rising and steadily diminishing rotunda, drum, dome and lantern-cupola. The stone, quarried in nearby Headington and further away in the Cotswolds, reinforces the contrast between the monumental, rough-faced basement and the smooth dressed stone forming the ashlar superstructure of rotunda and drum.

Inside the body of the Camera, Gibbs’s graceful oval ‘great Stair Case’ mounts by two main landings and two half-landings from the north entrance to the floor of the Reading Room formed by the rotunda. Here the drum is carried on a circular arcade of eight Ionic pilastered piers, from which a balustraded gallery extends sideways to the outer wall. Repeating the pattern of St Martin’s, larger pedimented windows illuminate the gallery level and, lower down, smaller rectangular windows serve the floor level; while in the drum, even larger segmental windows fill the vault with light. All three levels of fenestration describe one perpendicular line upwards from the apex of each of the eight groundlevel pedimented openings. Above the drum rises the dome, its interior divided by converging mouldings into eight richly decorated panels tapering towards the central rose. As for the interior surfaces, once again Gibbs engaged Artari, to enhance what Geoffrey Tyack has called one of the supreme ‘classical interior[s]’ in England. In a pedimented niche above the entrance-door stands a statue of Radcliffe, the work of Gibbs’s favourite sculptor, the Flemish Michael Rysbrack, who worked with Gibbs on many funereal monuments. We may imagine that if indeed Oxford’s authorities had set out to demonstrate the cosmopolitan nature of the ideal university, then the Radcliffe Camera is a most suitable testimony, a harmony of Classical, Renaissance and post-Renaissance architecture. As scholars here and abroad have argued, no British contemporary of Gibbs was more attuned to Continental ideas, with the Camera as the supreme example.

Can we categorise Gibbs in stylistic terms? His tower and steeple for St Martin’s register Ionic, Corinthian and Baroque motifs; the Radcliffe Camera has Mannerist and Baroque as well as neoclassical elements; Bank Hall, a private commission which now serves as Warrington Town Hall, was described by Gibbs himself as his Palladian masterpiece. But there was a nuance to Gibbs’s range of architectural reference: the Palladian movement was predominantly Whig and Protestant and so had little political or doctrinal attraction for Gibbs. John Summerson, in his account of Gibbs’s ‘individual contribution’ to British architecture, acknowledges the many sources of Gibbs’s variety, with Jones and Wren given full value. Yet Summerson emphasises the contrast between the ‘tameness’ of Gibbs’s domestic work and the élan of the public commissions, ecclesiastical and academic. For Summerson, as for David Watkin, the Radcliffe Camera is the acme of Gibbs’s work, yet their judgments differed from that of Sacheverell Sitwell, who – like Walpole before him – had found defects in the siting and styling of the Camera, while lauding St Mary’s, St Martin’s and the Cambridge Senate House – masterpieces, wrote Sitwell, by the 'Rococo' successor to Wren, James Gibbs.