Lutyens and the Edwardians: An English Architect and His Clients - Hardcover

Brown, Jane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670858714 ISBN 13: 9780670858712

Publisher: Viking Adult, 1996

Synopsis

'There will never be great architects or great architecture without great patrons,' wrote Edwin Lutyens in 1915. When he died on New Year's Day 1944, he had amassed well over five hundred clients. The great architect and his architecture are well known, but what about his patrons, his clients?
From his earliest patrons, a stream of repressed gentlewomen of intelligence and means, through a galaxy of Edwardian heroes and villains, this book tells their stories. Some of them are famous, others unknown, except as Lutyens' clients: here are Herbert Jekyll, Jennie Churchill, J. M. Barrie, Hugh Lane, Victoria Sackville, lords, ladies, Souls, bankers, press barons, politicians, and beau monde of Edwardian England, as well as a schoolteacher who inherited a fortune and a prospering Bradford wool merchant.
Lutyens and the Edwardians is lavishly illustrated with the human face of great architecture - sketches, drawings and photographs from family archives all over England.

About this title

Reviews

This bland, meandering roster of names, titles, and great houses, though spruced up by handsome illustrations, fails to live up to the elegance of its subject's designs. Best known for the magnificent country houses he built for distinguished members of the gentry, Edwin ``Ned'' Lutyens was the son of a portrait painter. Discovered and promoted by a wealthy neighbor in Surrey, Lutyens, who had demonstrated an uncanny talent for architecture from an early age, received his first commission as an architect (for a ``gentleman's cottage'') in 1889, when he was 20. He was rarely idle after that: The titled and the well- heeled beat a path to his door. ``There will never be great architecture without great patrons,'' Lutyens is often quoted as saying. He built on an ambitious, even opulent scale for several hectic decades. While he designed everything from cottages to tombs, he is best remembered for his elegant country houses: Temple Dinsley, Berrydowne Court, Deanery Garden. He also renovated a number of England's great houses, including Knole, which his romantic friendship with Lady Victoria Sackville afforded him the luxury of doing. His fortunes declined after WW I: His designs passed out of fashion, and some of his old patrons fell on hard times. He died deeply in debt. Brown seems little concerned with dramatizing Lutyens's life, however, focusing here on the lives of his patrons. Unfortunately, her narrative often seems more like a cozy society page studded with the great names of Edwardian society than a historical narrative. Indeed, her book (she is the author of Vita's Other World: A Gardening Biography of Vita Sackville-West, 1986) seems to treat distinguished names as a carefully cultivated landscape to be described without inquisitiveness or excess of passion. With too much text hindering any coffee table appeal, this will likely find an audience only among Anglophiles and DecArts & Architecture diehards. (16 color, 100 b&w photos) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Since the rise of Postmodernism, the reputation of Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens (1869-1944) has undergone a startling revival. He was the greatest English country house architect of the century-maybe of all time-and he capped his career with one of the great civic commissions of the century, the design of the new capital of India, New Delhi. This book explores Lutyens's Edwardian clients, a fascinating, artistically inclined group including such luminaries as Victoria Sackville and J.M. Barrie. Brown, a well-published English scholar of garden history, writes charmingly and affectingly about her subjects. Given current interest in Lutyens, this volume will be a fine addition to most architecture collections.
Peter S. Kaufman, Boston Architectural Ctr.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670858714
• ISBN 13: 9780670858712
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288