DOI Heft:
No. 61 (April, 1898)
DOI Artikel:Modern domestic architecture: the work of Mr. Ernest Newton, [1]
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.18391#0193
The JVork of Ernest Newton
the letter. Probably one of the most severe tests
that can be applied to any manner is whether it is
strong enough to stand the supreme flattery of
imitation. If it can, it deserves to be called a
" style j " if it cannot, it stands revealed as a mere
mannerism, that has but an accidental charm
which is rapidly diminished by every attempted
paraphrase. To copy literally and exactly the un-
related details of any style, and serve up the
mixture as an original design, is a secret of Punchi-
nello. The jerry builder will offer you a hideous
atrocity, whereof every window, every door, every
gable, every cornice, is a garbled replica of the
details of a master's work; as one might take
casts from masterpieces of the sculptor's art, a torso
here, a head there, arms from another, and legs
from a fourth, and produce not another master-
piece, but a monster. The parts may be more or
less right; the whole is absolutely wrong. Now, the
whole is greater than its parts, and a building must
always be judged as a whole. Mr. Newton has
proved himself an artist and a craftsman in a
hundred instances, for a mere glance through a
collection of drawings or photographs of houses he
has designed leaves one fact clear, and that is that
in each he has considered the house as a cubical
structure, and modelled it in his imagination, so to
speak, long before he proceeded to draw it.
The real inception of any work of art is when
its maker realises it as a whole. We all know
Mr. Herbert Spencer's famous argument, when he
shows that the average man has a very definite
limit to his imagination. If memory may be
trusted (I cannot refer to the text itself), he shows
you that while you can think of an orange—its
colour, shape, odour, texture, substance, skin, pips,
juice, and all the rest—as a concrete entity, it is
harder to form an equally complete mental image
of a grand piano, still more difficult to project a
parish with the same recognition of its thousand
details, and absolutely impossible to think of a
county in the same way. If one could project a
bird's-eye view of a parish and remember all the
unseen details of the interior of its houses, no
human intellect could do as much for a county : it
is only a map of a shire you can summon up
mentally. When Mr. Ernest Newton sets himself
to plan a house, it seems (so far as the result
allows one to deduce his chain of thought) that he
can project on his imagination the whole building.
He can think not only of the facade, or each
elevation, but of the mass. He can realise that
this chimney-stack means a fireplace within, that
windows imply certain illumination of a definite
room, that the shape of the rooms on one floor
affects those on another, and so on for all the
171
the letter. Probably one of the most severe tests
that can be applied to any manner is whether it is
strong enough to stand the supreme flattery of
imitation. If it can, it deserves to be called a
" style j " if it cannot, it stands revealed as a mere
mannerism, that has but an accidental charm
which is rapidly diminished by every attempted
paraphrase. To copy literally and exactly the un-
related details of any style, and serve up the
mixture as an original design, is a secret of Punchi-
nello. The jerry builder will offer you a hideous
atrocity, whereof every window, every door, every
gable, every cornice, is a garbled replica of the
details of a master's work; as one might take
casts from masterpieces of the sculptor's art, a torso
here, a head there, arms from another, and legs
from a fourth, and produce not another master-
piece, but a monster. The parts may be more or
less right; the whole is absolutely wrong. Now, the
whole is greater than its parts, and a building must
always be judged as a whole. Mr. Newton has
proved himself an artist and a craftsman in a
hundred instances, for a mere glance through a
collection of drawings or photographs of houses he
has designed leaves one fact clear, and that is that
in each he has considered the house as a cubical
structure, and modelled it in his imagination, so to
speak, long before he proceeded to draw it.
The real inception of any work of art is when
its maker realises it as a whole. We all know
Mr. Herbert Spencer's famous argument, when he
shows that the average man has a very definite
limit to his imagination. If memory may be
trusted (I cannot refer to the text itself), he shows
you that while you can think of an orange—its
colour, shape, odour, texture, substance, skin, pips,
juice, and all the rest—as a concrete entity, it is
harder to form an equally complete mental image
of a grand piano, still more difficult to project a
parish with the same recognition of its thousand
details, and absolutely impossible to think of a
county in the same way. If one could project a
bird's-eye view of a parish and remember all the
unseen details of the interior of its houses, no
human intellect could do as much for a county : it
is only a map of a shire you can summon up
mentally. When Mr. Ernest Newton sets himself
to plan a house, it seems (so far as the result
allows one to deduce his chain of thought) that he
can project on his imagination the whole building.
He can think not only of the facade, or each
elevation, but of the mass. He can realise that
this chimney-stack means a fireplace within, that
windows imply certain illumination of a definite
room, that the shape of the rooms on one floor
affects those on another, and so on for all the
171