The Terracotta Designs of Alfred Waterhouse - Softcover

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COLIN CUNNINGHAM is known to many as the presenter of numerous Open University television programmes on Architectural History. He has written extensively on Victorian architecture, most recently contributing to The Albert Memorial (ed. Chris Brooks, Yale University Press, 2000), and co--authored the award--winning Alfred Waterhouse 1830 -- 1905:Biography of a Practice (Oxford University Press, 1992). He is former Chairman of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, and recently retired from the post of Reader in Architectural History at the Open University.

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The Natural History Museum in London is one of Britain's finest examples of late Victorian architecture at its exuberant height. A decorative tour de force, it was conceived by Alfred Waterhouse, whose attention to detail in the creation of this masterpiece is legendary. The terracotta mouldings of flora and fauna adorning both interior and exterior of the building rival in richness and variety the equally renowned contents of the Museum's collections.
This book presents a history of the development of Waterhouse's designs for these mouldings, setting them in the context of his work as a whole and of their manufacture. It acknowledges his courage in selecting the generally frowned upon medium of terracotta for the execution of the ornament, rather than the established and respected material of carved stone. It also provides a unique document of his exquisite pencil drawings for the individual blocks: although many of the drawings were destroyed when their practical use had expired, over 130 still survive, and are held in the Museum's Library. Seldom seen and never reproduced in their entirety, they bear witness to the fact that Waterhouse was not only a skilled architect but also an extremely accomplished draughtsman. This is a unique portrait of an ornamental scheme which influenced a generation at the end of the nineteenth century.

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Introduction

In 1962, The Natural History Museum acquired a collection of pencil drawings of mammals, plants and a range of other species, both living and extinct, which now form a significant part of the Library's outstanding collection of paintings and drawings. Many of these artworks are important as the only record of now extinct species. Others are meaningful as creative reactions by artists, and several are by painters significant in the Western canon. Yet even these cannot compare to the unique collection of pencil drawings that forms the subject of this book. All 135 are by one artist; they were drawings made not to record specimens, nor to react to the exotica of nature, but as designs of flora and fauna with which to ornament the Museum building itself. They are, therefore, not scientific descriptions in any true sense, but were made to bridge the gap between accurate depiction and components that could be effectively fabricated in clay. I have, therefore, felt free as a non-scientist to use generic names in my text with a freedom equal to that with which they were drawn by Alfred Waterhouse. His menagerie, however, though only partly identifiable, does represent a concept of natural history the concept that was to identify the building as the first home for the natural history collections of the British Museum, establishing it as a leading scientific institution of the nineteenth century. A separate appendix lists the species as named by Waterhouse, together with their locations in the building, and, as far as possible, modern scientific names and common names. However, as they are nineteenth-century drawings and the ornament was for a typically Victorian building, we have retained throughout the text the names provided by Waterhouse or, more likely, the various keepers who advised him.

This remarkable collection of drawings was the generous gift of Michael Waterhouse, the architect's grandson. A generation after they arrived in the museum and almost a century and a quarter after they were made, it is at last possible to present them to a wider public. This volume reproduces every one of the drawings, setting them in the context of terracotta ornament in general and the devising of the decorative scheme of the museum in particular. The images will well repay examination for their own sake as the work of a fine draughtsman and as imaginative combinations of pattern and naturalistic depiction. The drawings are also unique in function and a rare record of co-operation between architect, scientist and sculptor. Each of these had a contribution to make and this book tells the story of how these three men, Alfred Waterhouse (1830-1905), Richard Owen (1804-1892) and M Dujardin (fl.1866-78) conceived the ornamental scheme, and how the drawings were developed, passing from pencil sketch to finished building block.

The array of creatures and twining plants that form the most interesting part of the ornament should be seen alongside the abstract patterned blocks, shafts and bases, string courses and corbels and all the rhythms of blue and cream terracotta that are the essence of the building's character as a whole. But the story does not end there, for the terracotta of the structure is supplemented by ornamental ironwork, stained glass and painted decoration. These other media were part of the overall scheme from the start, and the story of their achievement also has its place in the tale. The painted ceilings, in particular, are outstanding examples of a type of decoration that rarely survives; these are also discussed and illustrated.

But it is the series of pencil drawings that really brings us into contact with the creative mind that made this building what it is one of the finest and best-loved Victorian buildings of Britain, if not of the Western world. Each sheet bears one or more design, and, in many cases, the sheets are annotated with instructions and dates, letters or numbers, to show that they are part of a series. The collection consists of some 136 pages,(1) most of them approximately the same size, which were bound together in two volumes and cover the years from 1874 to 1878, that is, from a year after work began until three years before the opening of the completed structure. It comes as something of a disappointment to learn that, as a record of the ornament, the collection is incomplete. It is missing, for instance, all the drawings for the small roundels that adorn the mullions of the basement windows (fig 1), as well as those for the delightful capitals to the mullions of the ground-floor windows. As it is mainly those from the lower levels that are absent, one might guess that the earliest drawings were not thought to be valuable once the blocks were manufactured. Their loss is a sad gap in the collection. What is left nonetheless provides a rich feast of draughtsmanship. In addition, almost 300 other drawings for the building, which in turn will only be a fraction of the many designs, sheets of details and drawings for services and fittings that were made in the ten-year construction period, survive in the Royal Institute of British Architects (fig 2).(2) The chances of survival for any individual sheet were less than good. However, once the building began to rise, and its quality was appreciated, Waterhouse may well have begun storing his sketches separately, feeling that they had a particular value. The fact that they are all much smaller than his usual office drawings may also have helped preserve them, since they will almost certainly have been stored separately.(3)