Studio: international art (7.1896)

The Revival of English Domestic Architecture

Another exquisite building (here illustrated) is work which most impresses you is its wonderful
peculiarly noteworthy. It is a house and studio knowledge of the best examples of all countries,
for Mr. Percy Macquoid in Palace Court, Bays- Unlike one too-famous example, the New Law
water, where it attracts every passer-by, but a Courts, which is a patchwork of sketch-books—a
few doors from the famous Red House, with its thousand beautiful fragments in a kaleidoscopic
carved vestibule lined with Dutch tiles, that was confusion—in Mr. George's hands, the re-arrange-
a pioneer of the Queen Anne movement. This ments of motives used before owes as little to pre-
house by Mr. Ernest George is no less typical of cedent as do the phrases borrowed from the old

masters, re-harmonised and
re-scored by a Beethoven.
The unity of conception
that has brought all these
various features into a new
and self-contained har-
mony, reveals at once the
scholar and the creator.
The originality which con-
sists in doing everything
that has been done before,
in inverted fashion, does
not attract Mr. Ernest
George. He uses the old
motives in new combina-
tions, takes the old truth,
and revivifies it to modern
needs, and thereby is at
one with the poet or the
sculptor. For the best
word, the best moulding,
the best arch, can hardly
be invented to-day. True,
that many things not worth
doing have still been left
undone. And in this field
the genius of eccentricity
may always hope to find
fresh material to astonish
or amuse us. But to know
only the best of the past,
and re-infuse it with the ex-
pression of to-day, so that it
becomes the best of the pre-

SMOKING-ROOM AT 24 HARRINGTON GARDENS ERNEST GEORGE, ARCHITECT Sent-that is 3. WOrtll}' effort

(From a Photograph by Messrs. Bedford Lemere &■ Co.) for a builder of sentences

or a maker of houses.

the later movement and of the style he employs Here, in a paper not addressed to architects, it
so happily—a style that is essentially stone, as would serve no purpose to adduce types of Dutch
opposed to brick, whether large blocks of terra- architecture by which Mr. George has been in-
cotta, or actual masonry form the walls. If fluenced, nor to take detail by detail and discuss
we could look inside these homes we should see the workmanlike art of material, and the artistic
no less dignified treatment, for the architectural effects gained by direct and admirable means,
quality is always present in everything this artist Did nothing but his buildings remain to prove
touches. the fact, you could be sure that Mr. Ernest George

Perhaps the quality of Mr. Ernest George's had travelled far and seen much. But galleries of
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