More than thirty years ago, in 1981, John Murray published a sumptuous volume by J Mordaunt Crook, to celebrate the centenary of Burges's death. The origin of this book went further back to 1970, when Charles Handley-Read, a leading expert in Victorian Gothic art, invited Crook to write a book about Burges based on his extensive archive material. Fourteen months later, tragically, Handley-Read committed suicide and his widow, Lavinia, gave the material to Crook. She, too, took her own life a few months later. The book became something of a memorial to the Handley-Reads and a tribute to their passion for nineteenth-century art. Now a revised and enlarged edition of the book has been published, even more lavishly illustrated and in a much larger format.
William Burges was a strange genius, an architect and designer who built in the Gothic and Renaissance styles and shared with A W N Pugin the all-encompassing view of architecture as coterminous with life, but without Pugin's religious conviction. His contemporaries found him hard to comprehend. They called him ‘Ugly Burges’ to distinguish him from J B ‘Pretty’ Burgess, the painter. He was short-sighted and chubby-faced, and the writer Edmund Gosse claimed that just because he was so blind his work was more jewel-like than architecture. The cover of the new edition shows a view of Castell Coch bathed in evening sunshine, a ruin that Burges reconstructed for the third Marquess of Bute, then one of the richest men in the whole world. It is a Wagnerian creation on the slopes of the Taff Valley north of Cardiff, a product of scholarship, wit and fantasy, and an attempt to re-create the Victorian dream of the High Middle Ages. But it is the decoration and the detail that truly astonish. As Professor Crook says, commenting on Lady Bute's bedroom:
Lady Bute's bed – a framework of scarlet and gold, glittering with crystal ball bedknobs – is medieval to the point of acute discomfort. This room is surely a retreat for some lovelorn Tennysonian maiden – or for Dame Edith Sitwell playing the Lady of Shalott.
Reviewing the original volume in the Times Literary Supplement, David Watkin commented: ‘The obsessive, hallucinatory character of Burges's interiors and of the objects he designed for them suggest a mind if not bordering on insanity then reflecting aesthetically the impact of drugs.’ We know that Burges was partial to opium and alcohol, but his work was driven by his desire to re-create the romantic fantasy of the Middle Ages, drawing on its rich visual imagery but adding and reinterpreting so that the fusion of styles, including Italian, Islamic and Japanese, is overpowering and completely his own.
His first major architectural commission was the Protestant cathedral of St Fin Barre, Cork, in 1863. With its three tall spires it is the embodiment of thirteenth-century French Gothic planted in Ireland. His two major ecclesiastical commissions in England were Christ the Consoler, Skelton-on-Ure, completed in 1876, and St Mary's, Studley Royal, of 1878, both in Yorkshire. Both buildings are lavishly decorated, but perhaps Studley Royal is the more opulent, described by Pevsner as ‘a dream of Early English glory and an ecclesiastical masterpiece’.
Chapters divide Burges's work stylistically into ‘Renaissance’, ‘Gothic’, ‘Feudal’ and ‘Fantastic’. Wherever you look you see bright colours, winged lions, stained glass, exotic ornamentation, strange animals and jewelled chalices and decanters. One of his claret jugs has a carved handle consisting of a monster with bat ears, opal eyes and a lion's head, which would startle even the most hardened of drinkers.
Burges took English furniture off into extravagant new dimensions, specially designed in Pre-Raphaelite style to fit in with his richly painted interiors. Instead of the abstract or floriated ornament favoured by Pugin, Burges covered his pieces with figurative painting, depicting scenes from Chaucer, classical mythology, paganism, astrology, English folklore and Christian tradition. His Narcissus washstand, which the poet John Betjeman gave to Evelyn Waugh, is immortalised in Waugh's The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold as ‘a massive freak of fancy, decorated with metalwork and mosaic’.
In the chapter entitled ‘Feudal’, Crook gives an account of Burges's work at Cardiff Castle, Castell Coch and Mount Stuart for the third Marquess of Bute. Many of his designs for other commissions came to nothing, but with Bute's money he gave Cardiff a castle to rival Ludwig ii's Neuschwanstein in Bavaria. Crook comments: ‘The Cardiff skyline is a High Victorian fantasy, a belligerent rejection of Georgian harmony, balance and coherence: Billy Burges kicking Henry Holland and Capability Brown in the teeth.’
Burges died, aged fifty-four, before these schemes were complete, but they were finished to his designs and can be seen in all their overwhelming glory today. His work is so prodigious and outrageous in its invention that it is hard to remain neutral: you are either an enthusiast or an opponent. Minimalist he certainly is not. He was described by a friend ‘as a crank, but a genius, and a really good fellow’. Lady Bute called him ‘Ugly Burges who designs lovely things. Isn't he a duck?’.
The reissue of this definitive volume on his work, with its stylish prose and wealth of illustration, brings him alive for a new generation. Burges turned the High Victorian Dream into reality, and the results are here for all to see, and for many of us to marvel at.
