Pugin was born in 1812, the year when Bonaparte, the titan of Europe, met his nemesis in the snows of Russia, and England and the United States blundered into one of the most senseless wars in history, leading to the destruction by fire of the world’s first planned modern city, Washington. A grand year in which to be born, which he shared with Charles Dickens and Robert Browning.
However, while Dickens was a miserable child working at a Thames-side blacking factory, and Browning was a dreamy schoolboy learning to write Greek verse, Pugin was already giving full rein to his dazzling creative talents. He was an only child of adoring parents who recognized those talents from his infancy on and cosseted and nurtured them with devoted care. His father, Augustus-Charles Pugin (1762–1832), was a Parisian artist who came to London to escape the Terror, entered the Royal Academy Schools, and then became assistant to the busy and superbly gifted architect John Nash. The father, strictly speaking, was not a professional architect (though he designed Kensal Green Cemetery, that fascinating city of the dead). But he was a superlative draftsman, especially of architectural subjects; a painter, illustrator, and designer; and above all a teacher of art.1 His house, in Great Russell Street, was only 50 yards from the British Museum, with its magnificent Print Room where artists like Turner and Girtin came to study its drawings, and which A. W. N. Pugin knew from the age of five. His father conducted, from his house, a school of architectural draftsmanship, and the child Pugin mingled with the pupils, some of notable talent. The father was a highly successful illustrator (and writer) of books for the great Rudolph Ackermann, often collaborating with other artists. In 1808 he and Rowlandson produced the highly successful Microcosm of London, Pugin Senior doing the topographical settings and “Rowly” the figures. Both men were watercolorists of the highest accomplishment, specializing in pure, luminous washes. Pugin’s gifts can be seen at their best in his brilliant watercolor of Westminster Abbey, at the Royal Institute of British Architects, done in the year of A. W. N. Pugin’s birth.2
The child Pugin, then, grew up in a household that buzzed with activity—artists, publishers, engravers, and writers, all passionately determined to raise the banner of art, especially architectural art, high in an age when industry and commerce were transforming the most beautiful countryside in Europe, and overwhelming ancient towns, and the coal smoke from millions of chimneys, domestic and industrial, was tinting everything charcoal gray. The house was a fortress of cultural resistance, a defiant temple of beauty, and presiding over it was Pugin’s mother, Catherine Welby, daughter of a famous barrister, whose enchanting looks won her the title “Belle of Islington.” Her devotion to her gifted son helps to explain why he liked women so much, especially beautiful ones, and got on with them so well.3
Pugin began drawing, like Dürer and Turner, at the age of three. He quickly progressed to watercolors, and he continued to use pencils and brushes every day of his life. Every summer his parents took him on tours of the continent, where father and son settled down each morning to draw churches and other Gothic buildings. As anyone who takes topographical drawing seriously will tell you, the way to understand architecture thoroughly is to draw buildings, with care and in great detail. You are obliged to look at a building closely, repeatedly, and for long periods. Only thus do you learn what the architect was doing in a particular case, and as a rule you are also able to identify the contributions of the masons, carpenters, and other craftsmen. Pugin, throughout his life, did a huge number of drawings of Gothic buildings, in Britain and on his annual continental tours. His close study and reproduction on paper of actual medieval creations were the key to designing his own, and helped him to enter the minds of medieval builders and decorators: they formed, as it were, his apprenticeship under experts who had lived hundreds of years before him, until he became a master mason himself.4
Pugin drew not just buildings but the objects within them, of every kind and material. To him, from a very early age, art was ubiquitous; the world was, or could be, a continuum of beautiful artifacts; and craftsmen-artists were a collegial body of experts joining hands and skills to make everything that met the eye graceful and fitting. At eight he designed his first work, a chair. Thereafter there were few things in daily use, in the home or any other kind of building, that he did not re-create according to his own vision. In 1827, at age fifteen, he got his first professional commission—to design Gothic furniture for George IV at Windsor Castle; some of the furniture is still there, and in use.5 At the same time he began to be employed by the royal goldsmiths, Rundell and Bridge, to design a variety of precious objects for the king. At seventeen he set up his own business, designing furniture, and the firm remained in continuous production from 1829 until his death in 1852. In his teens he was a passionate theatergoer, and by age nineteen he was creating scenery for Covent Garden theater, alongside such professional scene painters and designers as Clarkson Stanfield and David Roberts, both future Royal Academicians and outstanding landscapists, for in the nineteenth century set design and landscape were closely linked. Pugin was soon designing theatrical costumes too. Indeed, what did he not design? His creative attention turned in every direction. The Victoria and Albert Museum, later founded as a depository and study center for the astonishing inventiveness of nineteenth-century designers and craftsmen, contains more objects by Pugin than by anyone else (though William Morris, who in some respects modeled himself on Pugin, comes close). These include countless wall tiles, a variety of materials, floor coverings of every kind, plates, trays, dessert dishes, stove tiles, flowerpots, tables, straight chairs, armchairs, cabinets, candlesticks, saltcellars, spoons, candelabras, dishes in metal, chalices, reliquaries, crosses, a chimneypiece, a roller blind, printed linen and cottons, curtains, and other textiles—and the collection at the Victoria and Albert represents only part of his output.6
From his teens, too, Pugin was a prolific writer of art books, which he also illustrated profusely. The 1820s were for Pugin a decade of boyish enthusiasm and joie de vivre, marked by exuberant sporting activities, especially rowing and sailing small boats, of which he always possessed and constantly used at least one. His life oscillated between intense artistic activity at the design table, at the workbench, or in his studio; and ferocious exercise outdoors, often in stormy weather. With the 1830s, however, came increasing high seriousness, as the scene darkened. His father died in 1832, and Pugin’s first major literary activity was to complete his large-scale work Examples of Gothic Architecture. The same year Pugin, who had married young, lost his first wife, Anne Carnet, who died giving birth to a daughter. Seeking comfort and reassurance, Pugin moved toward Roman Catholicism, and in 1835 he was received into the church. Thereafter, his artistic principles and his spiritual beliefs were one, and he saw medieval Gothic style and culture not only as the natural, normative expression for Catholics and indeed all Christians in England but as the right moral aesthetic for all of northern Europe (and its overseas dependencies). He dismissed the classical revival—which was powerful, even dominant in the England of his childhood and youth—as an anomaly, an inappropriate input from the Mediterranean, suitable only for blue skies and hot sun. To him “Gothic north” was tautological: the north was Gothic, and Gothic stood for the north.7
Pugin was thus one of the very few English architects, and the only outstanding one, with a firm, at times ferocious, ideological posture. He not only despised but positively loathed the neoclassical architects of the previous generation, especially Decimus Burton. Writing to his greatest patron, the Catholic earl of Shrewsbury, from the North Euston Hotel at Fleetwood, which Burton had designed, Pugin gave full vent to his rage and disgust:
The abomination of desolation, a modern Greek town is insupportable. I am sitting in a Grecian coffee room, in the Grecian hotel, with a Grecian mahogany table close to a Grecian marble chimneypiece, surrounded by a Grecian scroll pierglass, and to increase my horror the waiter has brought in breakfast on a Grecian sort of tray with a pat of butter stamped
with the infernal Greek scroll! Not a pointed arch within miles!8
In his anxiety to rout the classicists (and others) and to make Gothic the dominant style, especially for all religious and public buildings, Pugin used the literary and illustrative skill he had inherited from his father—and had improved on by perpetual observation and studio exercises—to launch a series of propaganda works unique in the art history of the Anglo-Saxon world. They put a case, vehemently, but they were also practical manuals for followers and disciples, and wonderful works of artistry in their own right. In 1835 came Gothic Furniture in the Style of the Fifteenth Century, Designed and Etched by A. W. N. Pugin. The next year came his masterpiece, Contrasts; or A Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, and Similar Buildings of the Present Day, Showing the Present Decay of Taste (a second volume appeared in 1841). Also in 1836 appeared two design books, one for goldsmiths and silversmiths, the other for iron and brass-work. In 1837 he published Details of Ancient Timber Houses of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries…Drawn on the Spot and Etched by A. Welby Pugin. The title speaks for itself: these were the fruits of his constant continental travels. In 1841 and 1843 he set out his aesthetic ideology in two magisterial volumes: The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture and An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England. He followed these key works with his most complex and painstaking contribution to the revival, his Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume, later supplemented by Floriated Ornament and Chancel Screens and Rood Lofts.9
This enormous output of aesthetic theory and practical guidance, based on on-the-spot studies, massive reading and research, uncannily exact observation, and tens of thousands of drawings, was without precedent in England (and has had no successor). Even in Italy, one would have to go back to Alberti to find anything remotely comparable. But unlike Alberti, Pugin was a practical architect and rapidly becoming a highly experienced one, who not only drew his own detailed plans but spent much time on-site to ensure that they were carried out exactly as he wished. He began by designing imaginary buildings and interiors; got two key commissions, one to remake an enormous Gothic house from Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire and another to fit out a Catholic school and seminary at St. Mary’s Oscott in Warwickshire in the Gothic manner; and at the same time gave striking public lectures on what he was doing. These works won him the enthusiastic approval of the English Catholic community, especially its old recusant gentry and aristocracy, who were beginning to lift their heads from the obscurity of the “penal years,” following the Act of Catholic Emancipation of 1829. Catholics were now free to spend their own wealth, or to collect funds by subscription, to endow churches and cathedrals, and Pugin became their master builder.
His first cathedral was St. Chad’s, Birmingham (1839–1841), built of brick to withstand the smoke and acid corrosion of the Black Country. He used motifs from the Baltic, where brick had been the basic material for Gothic architecture throughout the Middle Ages. St. Chad’s was a highly successful design, put up at great speed and minimum cost to suit the liturgical needs of the mother church in a vast industrial center. Pugin, in fact, was a functionalist, the first modern one, following two basic rules that he set down in his True Principles: first, that there “should be no features about a building which are not necessary, for convenience, construction, or propriety”; and, second, that “all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building.” He followed St. Chad’s with major cathedrals in Southwark in southeast London, Nottingham, and Newcastle upon Tyne; and many minor ones in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the empire, built under his direct supervision or according to his ideas. Indeed, no man in history was responsible for so many cathedrals. In addition there were dozens of churches—only Wren, with his total of seventy, built more.10 Some churches by Pugin were comparatively simple, for he served poor communities, who could not afford big spaces or elaborate ornaments. In this respect he was at a grave disadvantage compared with his Anglican followers such as William Butterfield and George Gilbert Scott, who could draw on the almost bottomless resources of the Anglican church, often backed by money voted in Parliament. But, just occasionally, he was able to let himself go, as in the church of St. Giles, Cheadle, in Staffordshire, paid for by Lord Shrewsbury, and entirely built, decorated, and furnished to Pugin’s exacting standards. This must rank as the finest church built in England in the entire nineteenth century, and the brightest jewel in the Gothic revival. In the last decade of his life, Pugin also devoted a vast amount of time and trouble to designing, building, and decorating his own house in Ramsgate, and its accompanying church, both masterpieces of their kind, and now being properly looked after following decades of neglect. At the same time as these independent activities, Pugin was collaborating with Sir Charles Barry on the new Houses of Parliament, built following the fire of 1834. The role played by Pugin in this immense enterprise was for a long time minimized or even suppressed, because of his militant Catholicism. It is now acknowledged, however, that Pugin supplied many of the drawings for the building itself, since Barry was ignorant of important aspects of the Gothic style; and that Pugin was entirely responsible for all the best and innovative features of the interiors, including all the decoration, especially the superbly presented House of Lords, the central jewel in the entire structure. Only now, since it has had all its grime removed, is this great building, outside and in, being recognized as a masterpiece of European art (though, alas, thanks to terrorists and the demands of security, the public has only limited access to the interior); and we still have not developed the habit of crediting it to Barry and Pugin.11
Two questions arise about Pugin as a creator. First, how did he manage to get through this enormous volume of work in his short life? There are many answers. First, owing to his precocity, his full working life began in his mid-teens, and his learning curve as a Gothic enthusiast started even earlier. He did not waste time at Oxbridge or art schools or trying to learn from people who knew less than he did. Second, his dislike of time-wasting extended to every aspect of his life. He was a very decisive man and never dithered. He made decisions quickly and stuck to them. He was extremely businesslike, with a sharp eye for costs and an acute nose for smelling out waste and incompetent workmen. He knew exactly how everything was done. As a scene painter he had learned carpentry, and he kept his hand in. He could carve, mix paint, lay bricks, tile a roof, and operate a forge or furnace for metalwork. Early in his career he formed close links with a succession of expert craftsmen whose quality and taste he could trust and who ran their own businesses. They included John Hardman, a metalworker who originally specialized in brass buttons and medals but whom Pugin encouraged to branch out into every kind of ironwork, into ecclesiastical jewelry and fittings, and even into stained glass, though for the last Pugin also employed the master craftsman William Wailes, especially at Cheadle. For structures, Pugin used George Myers, a gifted carver of wood and stone who was also an enterprising, reliable, fast-working builder. For every kind of ceramic work, especially the encaustic tiles so prominent in his interiors, Pugin used Herbert Minton, and for textiles of every kind, from carpets to chair bottoms, and superb wallpapers (one of the most important features of the Parliament building), he had the help of John Gregory Crace, another outstanding craftsman-artist.12
All these men ran sound businesses and could be relied on absolutely to deliver on time and to meet the highest standards. And since Pugin knew almost as much about their work as they did themselves, their collaboration was a union of equals. They worked as a team. From his first teenage business, which foundered in bankruptcy when he was twenty, Pugin had learned a great deal, and thereafter he paid the closest attention to costs, kept impeccable accounts, and eliminated expensive administrative overhead almost completely. While Pugin at his perfectionist best was inevitably expensive, and his efforts at Cheadle drew groans from Shrewsbury’s agent, Pugin gave tremendous val
ue for money. He worked at a great pace and made his subcontractors keep pace too—the best way of keeping down costs on a project—and his decisiveness meant that his work never had to be redone. Unlike most architects, he never wasted time or creative energy on having rows with clients. His lifelong association with trusted expert craftsmen meant he never had rows with them either. Pugin never ran an office crowded with expensive draftsmen and assistants. His office was his own mind, and his workroom. A snatch of dialogue survives: “I will send this to your clerk, Mr. Pugin.” “Clerk, sir? I never employ one. I should kill him in a week.”13 Though he reduced costs to a minimum, he carried all his accounts around with him, down to the minutest detail, “in a five-inch pocket book, kept in minute writing, like his diary.” Hence he could answer clients’ inquiries on the spot. He was an intensely practical man, “a serious sailor all his life,” who could do remarkable things with his huge, bare hands, including sewing his clothes.
His clothes and appearance tell a lot about him. Though only five feet four inches tall, he was immensely strong and formidable. He could easily “deck a man,” as he put it, and sometimes did, if he met with impertinence. He often wore a sailor’s jacket, pilot trousers, jackboots, and a windjammer hat. Once, thus dressed, he descended from the Calais boat and got into his usual first-class carriage at Dover. Another snatch of conversation is preserved: “Halloa, my man [said a fellow passenger], you have mistaken, I think, your carriage.” “I believe you are right. I thought I was in the company of gentlemen.”14 (That fellow passenger was lucky to escape decking.) Pugin had a broad chest; a massive forehead; restless, penetrating gray eyes; a loud voice; a tremendous laugh; long, thick straight hair; rapid movements; astonishing mental and physical energy; highly strung nerves; and a choleric, passionate temperament. He occasionally gave way to “honest rages with no malice in them,” and discerning people recognized “genius and enthusiasm in every line of his face.”
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