C.F.A. Voysey (review)

Reviewed by: C. F. A. Voysey Christine Bolus-Reichert (bio) C. F. A. Voysey, by Wendy Hitchmough; pp. 240. London: Phaidon Press, 1995, 1997. Distributed by Chronicle Books, San Francisco, £19.99, $75.00, $39.95 paper. In the final pages of her recent monograph, Wendy Hitchmough struggles with the complexity of her subject’s historical legacy: “If circumstances had been different, if for example Voysey’s Gothic competition entry for the government buildings of Ottawa of 1914 had been successful, then his position in history might have been quite different. He might have been cast in the final chapter of the Victorian era rather than in the prelude to the modern one, and perhaps he would have been more comfortable among the Victorians, but he was not an altogether unwilling partner in the creation of his own legend” (222). The “legend” of the English architect Charles Francis Annesley Voysey was, of course, the invention of influential admirers such as Hermann Muthesius, John Betjeman, and Nikolaus Pevsner, who aided in the revival of his reputation long after his last major commission in 1919. And it is with this legend of Voysey as precursor to Modernism— [End Page 559] as “the architect of individuality” rather than of historicism—that Hitchmough implicitly contends throughout her work and to which she finally surrenders. Voysey has remained such a perplexing and controversial figure a full century after designing his most important houses in large measure because of his apparent betrayal of the revolution in English domestic architecture that his own work had produced. In writing the first comprehensive study of Voysey’s architectural output (she does not deal as closely with his furniture, textiles, papers, metalwork, or gardens, though all appear as they intersect with larger design issues), Hitchmough must acknowledge our hero’s dangerous flirtation with the unfashionable Gothic and his occasional lapses into crude eclecticism. As Hitchmough shifts between detailed analyses of the houses (in these moments showing real sensitivity to the designer’s intentions, as well as the aesthetic impact of each design) and the more personal record of Voysey’s life, she skillfully (and, I think, regretfully) prepares the reader for the ultimate dissolution of a great career. Throughout the work, Hitchmough relies on Voysey’s own published writings to establish him as “Pugin’s last disciple” (196) and to argue finally that “Voysey reenacted the martyrdom of his father” (206) when he defended Gothic on moral and spiritual grounds to the detriment of his architectural practice. Like many of the great writers and artists of the 1890s, Voysey perches impossibly upon the boundary of sensibilities and passions we can recognize only apart, and the qualities that produced his remarkable art thus seem to belong to different men. Hitchmough, like Pevsner before her, sees Voysey as “a vital link between the Arts and Crafts and Modern movements” (7); but unlike her myth-making predecessor, Hitchmough does not gloss over Voysey’s less progressive attributes. Instead, she examines the architect’s relations with his masters—his father Reverend Voysey (a descendent of John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church in England), critic and reformer John Ruskin, and Gothic Revival architects A. W. N. Pugin, George Devey, and J. P. Seddon—and turns up not rebelliousness but abiding respect. In particular, Hitchmough attributes Voysey’s capacity for principled, even foolhardy, action to a powerful identification with his father: when Voysey was only twelve years old, his father was charged with heresy, tried before the Chancellor’s Court, and deprived of his living. Though he won the support of some of the most illustrious figures of the day—Ruskin, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Huxley, to name a few—Reverend Voysey suffered terribly for his religious convictions. In Hitchmough’s view, the effect on Voysey’s “adult character and behavior” was “disastrous” because he would eventually “challenge the architectural establishment by resolutely defending the Gothic tradition in the face of a sweeping classical revival” (11). Hitchmough’s study is strongest when she keeps Voysey’s contradictions before her: though the majority of his architectural output bears only the faintest traces of any medieval influence, yet his admiration for the purity of Pugin’s aims...

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