Michael Fisher, FSA, has added hugely over the years to the literature on Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–52) and his collaborators. His new tome deals with the life and work of John Hardman Powell, Pugin’s pupil and eventual son-in-law (Powell married Anne (1832–97), daughter of Pugin and his first wife, Anne Garnett (1809–32)), who became chief designer for the Birmingham firm of John Hardman and Co., manufacturers of metalwork, stained glass and other furnishings for Pugin and many other architects influenced by the great Goth.
Fisher is steeped in that curiously remote world of nineteenth-century recusancy and conversion to Roman Catholicism with which the Pugins, Hardmans and Powells were concerned, all at a time when there was great ill-feeling against ‘Papal Aggression’, exacerbated when the hierarchy was re-established and Nicholas Patrick Stephen Wiseman (1802–65), from 1840 bishop of Melipotamus in partibus infidelium, was appointed cardinal-archbishop of Westminster in 1850 by Pio Nono (Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, pope from 1846 to 1878). Wiseman’s An Appeal to the Reason and Good Feeling of the English People on the Subject of the Catholic Hierarchy (Reference Wiseman1850), a pamphlet that attracted a blizzard of opprobrium from Protestant opinion, did not manage to pour oil on troubled waters: parliament passed the Ecclesiastical Titles Act in 1851 (14 and 15 Vict. c 60), prohibiting the assumption of Diocesan names identical to those of the Anglican Church, but the law was never enforced, and it was repealed in 1871 (33 and 34 Vict. c 53). English Roman Catholics found themselves often in a strange position, not least in relation to a papacy that did not always seem to appreciate their difficulties, and which, to them, sometimes seemed embarrassingly out of touch.
Pugin perceived his own Roman Catholicism in terms of revival of the highest expression of art found in the creations of the Middle Ages, and so desired continuity between the Roman Church of his day and the English Church of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Thus, Pugin’s vision was of medieval English Catholicism, not of what became Ultramontanism. The latter involved the principles of absolute papal supremacy outside Italy, north of the Alps, with its love of Baroque splendour, epitomised, perhaps, in the London Oratory of St Philip Neri and the church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary at Brompton, Kensington, London – designed from 1878 by Herbert Augustus Keate Gribble (1847–94), with a sumptuous interior of the Gesù type, largely decorated (1927–32) by Commendatore Cesare Titus Giuseppe Formilli (1860–1942). It is a building that would have horrified Pugin, who sought to provide settings and artefacts based on English medieval exemplars to beautify Roman Catholic worship: he gave ecclesiology, intimately associated with his love of ritual, symbols and detail, an important role, but one that would become hugely significant outside the Roman Church, for Puginian Gothic Revival was more eagerly and widely embraced by Anglicans, as English Gothic held no attractions for Ultramontanes or for the large number of Irish immigrants in rapidly expanding English cities.
To Pugin, great art and Catholicism were intimately connected, and he sought a revival of English Gothic art and architecture, not least to make visible and living the link between the Roman Church in nineteenth-century England and that great legacy of English medieval ecclesiastical art and architecture that had survived, much of it the very finest and most beautiful the nation’s genius had ever created. Such a programme required a revival of liturgical scholarship, the father of which, in the English Roman Church, was Daniel Rock (1799–1871), chaplain to the earl of Shrewsbury. Rock’s Hierurgia (Reference Rock1833) was followed by The Church of Our Fathers as seen in St Osmund’s Rite for the Cathedral of Salisbury (1849– Reference Rock53), which dealt with ritual and is a very full account of religious observance, ceremonial and other matters that, if revived in England, would require not only appropriate new architectural settings, but all sorts of artefacts, furnishings and objects, properly designed and based on historical precedent, and then manufactured.
It should be remembered that once the archaeological phase of the Gothic Revival got underway, not just architects had to learn the language of the style, but numerous tradesmen also had to be trained in lost skills in order to make what that style required. The huge impact Pugin made in these matters cannot be overestimated. He was fortunate, not only in finding able people capable of realising his designs, but also who shared his religious convictions, for the Powells and Hardmans were also Roman Catholics.
John Hardman Powell was not just Pugin’s only pupil; he himself was a gifted designer who continued where Pugin, worn out and insane after a phenomenal output of creativity, left off. In this book, Fisher has brought Powell and his milieu to life and has uncovered a wealth of wonderful illustrations, including sketches showing individuals in ordinary domestic settings, as well as designs for stained-glass windows, seals, memorial brasses and several watercolours by Pugin himself (including one of St Augustine’s, Ramsgate, under construction; and a beautiful, lively sketch of the twelfth-century western towers of what was St Mary’s Abbey, the seventh-century Saxon church on the north Kent coast between Herne Bay and Westgate-on-Sea, subsequently demolished in 1809). However, Fisher was refused access to the collections in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery on grounds of ‘staff shortages’. Such prohibitions are inimical to scholarship, and raise all sorts of questions about the kind of world in which we find ourselves, when bureaucrats can dictate who can do what to ‘save’ tuppence while squandering millions on half-baked schemes of their own so that they can appear politically correct.
Nevertheless, the material that Fisher presents in this volume is delightful, and beautifully produced by Spire Books, now run from Dr John Elliott’s home at Old Standlynch Farm, Downton, near Salisbury (the successor of Spire Books Ltd, which brought out numerous fine volumes on architectural and ecclesiastical history). Fisher and his publisher have given us a valuable new study that emphasises how important were the artists and manufacturers who realised designs of creative men like Pugin: they were often undervalued, but without them much would have remained on paper. In Powell’s case, the circumstances of his training by Pugin, his marriage to Pugin’s eldest daughter and his tremendous legacy of marvellous designs have enabled his biographer to do him full justice.
Even in death, Powell was reunited with his master: he was entombed with Pugin in the chantry-chapel in St Augustine’s, joined two years later by his beloved wife, Anne. The story has been well told and handsomely presented. Fisher and his publisher are to be congratulated on a remarkable achievement.
