Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/520

 of an architectural evolution. The red-brick walls and tiled roofs, the white sash-barred windows, the inglenooks and bay-recesses of studio-houses, gave a new sense of building to dwellers in square, blank-windowed rooms and monotonous, drab streets. The style was called ‘Queen Anne’; but in Shaw's work it was not a revival of the eighteenth century so much as a recovery of the building art. There has followed the bathos of commercial exploitation; but the suburban inanities are not to be laid at the door of the pioneer architects, Philip Webb, John James Stevenson [q.v.], Nesfield, or Shaw. Lowther Lodge, for example, built by Shaw in 1874 (now the home of the Royal Geographical Society) is the English maison—the town-house, standing in its own grounds, and having style in the practical sense of its needs. Shaw's country-houses possessed the essential merit of being built to requirement and site—whether in the gable and chimney ‘picturesque’ of half-timber and turret, as at Leys Wood, Sussex (1868), Preen Manor, Shropshire (1871), and Cragside, Northumberland (1872); or in the broader stone-work and squarer blocking of Adcote, Shropshire (1876–1881), and Dawpool, Cheshire (1883). In these country-houses the ‘hall’ became the great room as distinctly as Shaw had given that office to the ‘studio’ for his artist clients.

In 1867 Shaw married Agnes Haswell Wood, and in 1876 with their family of three children they moved from St. John's Wood to Ellerdale Road, Hampstead. At the same time he took new offices at 29 Bloomsbury Square, a house now pulled down. His health, which gave way in 1877, much improved in 1881, after a visit to Aix-les-Bains. The next fifteen years were those of his second architectural manner, preluded indeed by a house built for himself at Hampstead (1876), and others in Queen's Gate, Kensington. The town-houses of his design on the Chelsea embankment and in Kensington, and the offices built for the Alliance Assurance Company at the corner of St. James's Street, have a composed dignity of façade along with the space and ease of interior convenience. Two good examples are the houses which he built in Hampstead for the portrait-painter, Edwin Longsden Long [q.v.]. For city architecture, however, his masterpiece of this period is New Scotland Yard; its tiers of official rooms and its official material of ‘convict’ granite are combined with masterly planning and monumental effect; but it is the only public building for which Shaw's genius was utilised. No commission came to him from the universities; his church-buildings, e.g. at Bournemouth, belong chiefly to the early years of his practice; and, though the Harrow Mission church in Latimer Road, Notting Hill, and All Saints', Leek, are of the later period, no cathedral building was put in his hands. The opportunity for big architecture came, however, in commissions for two great country houses, Chesters, Northumberland, and Bryanston, Dorset. The palatial expression of nobleness, as we recognize this in the Italian villa or the French château, has nowhere in this last hundred years been given such distinction as at Bryanston, built from 1890 to 1894 for Viscount Portman. Unfortunately, the lay-out of the domain was taken out of the architect's hands, and so the conception remains an incomplete one.

In the last years of the nineteenth century, Norman Shaw, owing to renewed ill-health, was relinquishing active practice. He gave up his office, and in 1909 he retired from the Royal Academy. But public authorities often consulted him about their building problems, and to his advice we owe some attempts to give our English capital city a dignity worthy of its imperial position. But, as with Wren so with Shaw, the projects for straightening out the haphazard muddle of London were mostly blocked. Before his scheme for Regent Street could be extricated from the slough of mixed opinions and vested interests he died at Hampstead, 17 November 1912.

Critics have blamed Norman Shaw for his carelessness of the constructive proprieties in which he, as a Gothic architect, had been strictly bred. In his breakaway into ‘Queen Anne’ he was found rearing solid house-fronts on steel skeletons, and plastering brickwork with half-timber veneers and barge-board frillings—stylistic scenery which has been vulgarized ad nauseam at the hands of imitators. But all Victorian architecture must needs come under the same censure—it has been a profession of pedantry paid for by fee. The architect of the 'seventies or 'eighties could not be an artist, like the painter or the sculptor, with work executed and acclaimed as his. Only by partnership with a client was a Victorian architect able to get to work at all; his genius was conditioned by the necessity of gaining and keeping a practice. It was in this that Norman Shaw stood out among his fellows. His was a magnetic personality 494