[BITList] Gothic revivalism

[John Feltham]

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Butterfield,  William  (1814-1900), architect and designer, was born on 7 September 1814 in London, the second child and eldest son of William Butterfield (1783-1866), chemist and wharfinger, and his wife, Ann (1793-1867), the daughter of Robert Steven, a leather factor of the City of London, and his wife, Jane Dawson. The details of Butterfield's early life are obscure but its circumstances were modest. He was one of nine children in a nonconformist family. At the time of his birth his father kept a chemist's shop at 173 Strand.

At sixteen Butterfield was apprenticed to Thomas Arber, a builder in Pimlico. Two years later, possibly as a result of his father's increased prosperity, he embarked on an architectural training and was articled to E. L. Blackburne, an antiquarian architect. Butterfield later spent a brief time in the office of the Greek revival architects William and Henry Inwood before finding employment in 1838 in a practice in Worcester, probably that of Harvey Eginton. During these years he made a serious, if limited, study of medieval architecture, 'laboriously visiting old buildings' as he later recalled, 'especially churches'  (Thompson, 59).

In 1840 Butterfield returned to London, setting up in practice at Lincoln's Inn Fields. Two years later he moved to 4 Adam Street, Adelphi, which was to remain his office for the rest of his life.

Butterfield's first significant commission was for his uncle, W. D. Wills, the Bristol tobacco manufacturer, for whom he built the Highbury Congregational chapel. Completed in 1843, its use of rubble stone and irregular quoins shows how quickly he assimilated the ideas expounded by Pugin in his True Principles of Gothic Architecture (1841).

Ecclesiology and the high-church party

The determining factor in Butterfield's life and work was his involvement from the early 1840s with the ecclesiological movement. It is not clear at what point he became an Anglican, but he had letters published in The Ecclesiologist in 1843 and was elected to the Cambridge Camden Society the following year. From this time he was at the heart of the mid-Victorian religious revival and essential to that aspect of it that sought intellectual and aesthetic expression in architecture. He was to become, as George Gilbert Scott wrote, the architect of the 'High Church party'. Yet Butterfield's profound, austere religious faith retained elements of his native nonconformism. He believed in the central importance of the Bible and his distaste for any doctrinal unorthodoxy eventually kept him from worshipping at his own most famous church, All Saints, Margaret Street.

Butterfield began by working in the fourteenth-century English Gothic style, as advocated by Pugin and the Cambridge Camden Society. St Saviour's, Coalpit Heath, Gloucestershire (1844-5), is in this vein. In the vicarage, however, for which precedents were less obvious, Butterfield's own style began to emerge. At the same time he began work on St Augustine's College, Canterbury, built for A. J. Beresford Hope. This was a quintessentially ecclesiological venture, an attempt to revive, on an ancient site, not only the fabric of the middle ages but the spirit as well. According to R. J. E. Boggis, Butterfield intended 'some sort of restoration of the old monastery ... and not a mere college'  (Boggis, A History of St Augustine's College Canterbury, 1907, 55). The resulting buildings show how his strict historicism was becoming modified by a growing interest in solid mass, apparent in the continuous roofline and abrupt punctuation of the wall surfaces by window tracery in the same plane.

Four years later at Great Cumbrae Island in the Firth of Clyde, Butterfield built the College of the Holy Spirit for George Frederick Boyle, later sixth earl of Glasgow, who was committed to reviving the Scottish Episcopal church in the Tractarian spirit. Butterfield's own Gothic language had by now developed, though still in a Puginian idiom. The church at Cumbrae, with its associated buildings, shows his genius for picturesque grouping: the asymmetrical elements drawn tightly round the soaring spire, the whole composition, in pale local stone, set deftly into the side of the island.

With Cumbrae and other substantial commissions that now came to him, Butterfield's career was under way by the late 1840s. He was known, too, through the Instrumenta ecclesiastica, published from 1847 by the Ecclesiological Society. Butterfield was its de facto editor and hence in a position to publish his own designs for metalwork and furnishings. These became widely known to and favoured by high-church clergy, patrons, and architects.

It was All Saints, Margaret Street, in London, however, that established Butterfield as a national figure. This was the model church of the Ecclesiological Society. It has been since its inception one of the most discussed of nineteenth-century buildings. It marked a turning-point in Butterfield's career and in the Gothic revival, introducing to both the elements of structural polychromy and continental Gothic that were to be defining characteristics of the high Victorian manner.

Once again it was Beresford Hope who engaged Butterfield. One set of designs was already prepared when Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture was published, in May 1849. Three months later Hope told his backer Henry Tritton that the plans had been altered to reflect the 'aesthetic possibilities of different materials' that were now becoming clearer to Hope, Webb, and other ecclesiologists (letter from A. J. B. Hope to Henry Tritton, 6 Aug 1850, Tritton collection; Thompson, 349). The result, built in banded brick with a densely elaborated interior, was like nothing before it and liberated Gothic architecture, Charles Eastlake wrote in his History of the Gothic Revival (1872), from 'the trammels of ... precedent'  (p. 253). The church, clergy house, and school are fitted ingeniously into a small site, the church set back but emphasized by its great Germanic spire. Rather than miniaturize details, Butterfield made dramatic play with them, allowing the porch to be cut off where it appears to collide with the house. Each of these elements was striking to contemporaries and divided critical opinion then and since.

Internally the style was still essentially English Gothic, though overlaid with Italianate surface polychromy. The interior is dominated by profuse and in places discordant decoration, the overall effect having suffered from disagreements between Hope and Butterfield, who by the time the building was finished had quarrelled badly. All Saints was completed in 1859, but Butterfield continued to work on it for the rest of his life attempting to correct its faults.

Middle years and major works

The 1850s and 1860s were the years of Butterfield's greatest work, much of it ecclesiastical, and all of it developing the polychromatic style of All Saints. St Matthias, Stoke Newington (1849-53), was built as part of the high-church campaign to reconvert the urban poor. The great buttress at the east end, a massively splayed version of the one at Dorchester Abbey, which he had restored, was described by E. A. Freeman, in a letter to The Ecclesiologist, as 'depraved' (11, 1850, 208-10; Thompson, 260). This was an early instance of the view of Butterfield's work as wilfully distorted, ugly to the point of sadism, that has subsequently dogged and at times overwhelmed his reputation.

Butterfield's only country house, the austere Milton Ernest Hall, Bedfordshire, was built in 1853-4 for his brother-in-law Benjamin Starey. On its completion he went with Starey on a foreign tour, commenting afterwards to his friend John Duke Coleridge that 'you will think me odd of course but I am more than ever persuaded that an Architect gets but little by travel. I am only glad that I had made up my own mind about a hundred things in art before seeing Italy'  (Butterfield, MS letter, 30 Sept 1854, priv. coll.). In his use of precedents-English or continental-Butterfield always made up his own mind. Historicism like functionalism was the servant not the master of his imagination.

At Baldersby in Yorkshire from 1855 to 1857 Butterfield built an estate village for Lord Downe. Here he showed his range along the full scale of architectural propriety, from the dignity of the country church to cottages of distinguished simplicity. In these and in his parsonages-at Coalpit Heath, and Hensall and Pollinton in Yorkshire-he created the simplified vernacular forms from which the domestic Gothic of the next generation, Philip Webb, W. E. Nesfield, and Norman Shaw, would take their cue.

In 1855 Butterfield began work on a new chapel for Balliol College, Oxford (1855-7). St Alban the Martyr, Holborn, London, followed in 1859-62, and St Augustine's, Penarth, Glamorgan, from 1864 to 1866. From the mid-1850s the emphasis in his work began to shift from mass to linearity. The development of his style has been characterized by his biographer Paul Thompson as first a resolution of the Gothic into its geometric elements of circle, square, and triangle and then, in this later phase, a process of abstraction from volume to line. The polychromatic patterns became increasingly complex, often on the diagonal, acting as a counterpoint to the structure.

In 1858 Butterfield began work at Rugby College, Warwickshire, where he built the New Quad in 1867 and the chapel in 1872. Here the tower, an octagon with pyramidal roof, shows, as Thompson, puts it, 'the massive High Victorian forms ... veiled, withdrawn, abstracted yet defiant'  (Thompson, 287). Though they have sometimes struck critics as chaotic, Butterfield's effects are in fact finely controlled, almost metrical. They play on the rhythms of a familiar architectural language as the 'sprung rhythm' of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who knew and admired Butterfield's work, plays on the spoken word. Hopkins's 'stress' and 'instress' may seem closer to the effect of Butterfield's work than his own notion of 'gaiety', but the view of him as a conscious apostle of ugliness-a contemporary view enlarged upon by historians-was dispelled conclusively by Thompson.

Butterfield's practice was prosperous but not extensive. He disliked competitions or even publication of his work which, in monochrome, tended to give a misleading impression. He maintained close control over every aspect of his buildings. Despite his interest in Ruskin, he firmly discouraged individual expression in his craftsmen. Designing in many media, he had a particular affinity for metalwork, in which he had some practical skill, and stained glass, in which he had none. Here, however, by the sheer force of personality he brought to bear on designers he created a distinct 'Butterfield' style. Characterized by 'clarity, vigour and severity', as Michael Kerney has described it, Butterfield's glass was conceived as integral to his polychromatic interiors, creating mosaic effects with complex leading and jewel-like colour  (Kerney, 11). His style was influenced by the growing taste for the Pre-Raphaelite artists Giotto and Fra Angelico. Butterfield worked with several designers, including Pugin, but his most fruitful collaboration was with Alexander Gibbs from about 1861.

The most important church of Butterfield's later career-All Saints, Babbacombe, Devon-was begun in 1867. Here the use of tile, brick, stone, and vivid marbles in the interior reached a height of 'inspired strangeness', as Goodhart-Rendel thought  (B. Cherry and N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England, Devon, 2nd edn, repr. with corrections 1991, 848). Butterfield's marble font and pulpit enhance a sense of hard, organic integrity. The following year he received the commission for Keble College, Oxford. Completed in 1886, this was the architectural apotheosis of the Oxford Movement in which Nikolaus Pevsner saw 'a summing up of [Butterfield's] ideals as well as his motifs'  (J. Sherwood and N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England, Oxfordshire, 1974, 225). This is especially true of the chapel, a single, vast space, crowned with some of Gibbs's most successful windows. The classicizing horizontal elements that ground all Butterfield's work are here combined with mannerist details. The columns, half recessed into the walls, have been seen to echo Michelangelo's staircase in the vestibule of the Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence.

Later life and lesser works

Butterfield's personal life had settled early into the spartan routine that was to characterize it. He never married, and spent his life between Adam Street and the Athenaeum, to which he was elected in 1858. 'A perplexing and challenging' character, as John Coleridge's son Stephen recalled; a shy man 'who carried firmness to the point of obstinacy'  (S. Coleridge, Memories, 1913, 82-3). The stories of his ruthless perfectionism include his habit, when visiting stained glass workshops, of putting his umbrella through work he disliked.

Yet to his family and few intimates Butterfield was a lovable man who returned the affection he received. To John Coleridge he wrote: 'I am not tempted to wish for general popularity ... Steady sympathy like yours through good report & evil report, is alone worth having'  (Butterfield to Coleridge, 28 Dec 1874, priv. coll.). General popularity was never his. Not until 1884, after two previous proposals, did he receive the RIBA gold medal.

In his later work there is a lessening of elaboration, then at the end what Thompson characterizes as a 'coarsening' and a failure of invention. Butterfield's influence was considerable, especially on Philip Webb, whom he knew well, but indirect. Of his pupils the only notable architect was Henry Woodyer. Butterfield offered no obvious solution to the late nineteenth century's search for a style. To Norman Shaw it seemed that 'we are all in much the same boat, except Butterfield, who is in a boat of his own all by himself'  (A. Saint, Richard Norman Shaw, 1976, 219).

Butterfield built St Andrew's, Rugby, in 1875 and provided designs for the cathedral at Melbourne, Australia, in 1877. His most distinguished late work was the Chanter's House, Ottery St Mary, Devon, a remodelling and extension of the family home of the Coleridges. In style it is a work of the 1860s, showing the 'masculine severity' that the patron had long admired in his friend's work. For Coleridge, his son Gilbert said, 'Gladstone must always be right ... Butterfield the greatest architect'  (Hall, 52).

As well as reflecting the effects of age and an inflexible character, Butterfield's later career also perhaps suffered from that loss of confidence that characterized his generation. The implications of evolutionary theory, to some extent subsumed into a Christian view of creation by the use of minerals and marbles in structural polychrome, were by the end of the century unanswerable. 'The faith & the tradition which made strong men of our fathers are going', Butterfield wrote to Coleridge  (letter, 10 June 1883, priv. coll.). 'There will shortly ... be nothing left for us to believe in but ourselves, and that faith ... is comfortless'  (ibid.).

Butterfield was the quintessential high Victorian, epitomizing the qualities the age admired: 'reality' and 'go'. His work speaks of both the confidence and the anxieties of the mid-Victorians. Yet he was also an original, with some of the freakishness of genius. Few architects can have been subject to such widely different interpretations.

If some of his contemporaries thought him too individual, too careless of precedent, Butterfield seemed to later critics all too typical. For the generations that found Victorian mores repressive and repulsive, Butterfield's buildings seemed to possess these qualities. John Summerson thought his love of 'ugliness' amounted to 'purposeful sadism'  (J. Summerson, 'William Butterfield, or, The glory of ugliness', Heavenly Mansions and other Essays on Architecture, 1949, passim and 175). Kenneth Clark dared not devote a chapter to him in The Gothic Revival published in 1928, at a time when Keble College was a joke and generally believed to have been designed by Ruskin  (K. Clark, The Gothic Revival, rev. edn, 1950, 3-5). Pevsner saw him as a proto-brutalist  (N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England, Oxfordshire, 1974, 227). Butterfield's work has come gradually to be better understood but is still arguably undervalued in relation to his contemporaries.

In 1891 Anne Starey, Butterfield's sister, to whom he was deeply attached, died. Butterfield gave up most of his practice the following year. His last known work was in 1895 at All Saints, Margaret Street, London. He had moved, in 1886, to 42 Bedford Square and it was there that he died on 23 February 1900. He was buried in Tottenham cemetery.

Rosemary Hill 

Sources  P. Thompson, William Butterfield (1971) + W. Butterfield, MS letters to John Duke Coleridge, priv. coll. + M. Kerney, 'The stained glass commissioned by William Butterfield', Journal of Stained Glass, 20/1 (1996), 1-30 + P. Thompson, 'All Saints' Church Margaret Street, reconsidered', Architectural History, 8 (1965), 73-94 + M. Hall, 'The Chanter's House, Devon', Country Life (10 Jan 1991), 50-55 + H. Ricardo, 'William Butterfield', ArchR, 7 (1900), 259-63; 8 (1900), 15-23 + CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1900)
Archives Arundel Castle, corresp. and plans relating to Arundel church + Balliol Oxf., corresp. relating to Balliol College chapel + Bodl. Oxf., corresp. relating to Keble College chapel [copies] + Devon RO, corresp. relating to Tattershall church and schools + E. Sussex RO, specifications for restoration of St Clements Church, Hastings + Essex RO, Chelmsford, plans, etc., relating to new works at Ardleigh church + priv. coll., Coleridge MSS + priv. coll., Starey MSS + RIBA, Caroe MSS + Winchester College, corresp. relating to Winchester College
Likenesses  J. F. Coleridge, charcoal drawing, 1874, Keble College, Oxford [see illus.] · J. F. Coleridge, drawing, Chanter's House, Ottery St Mary
Wealth at death  £16,369 14s.: probate, 17 March 1900, CGPLA Eng. & Wales




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