William Burges Quotes

William Burges was an English architect and designer. Among the greatest of the Victorian art-architects, he sought in his work to escape from both nineteenth-century industrialisation and the Neoclassical architectural style and re-establish the architectural and social values of a utopian medieval England. Burges stands within the tradition of the Gothic Revival, his works echoing those of the Pre-Raphaelites and heralding those of the Arts and Crafts movement.

Burges's career was short but illustrious; he won his first major commission for Saint Fin Barre's Cathedral in Cork in 1863, when he was 35, and he died, in 1881, at his Kensington home, The Tower House, aged only 53. His architectural output was small but varied. Working with a long-standing team of craftsmen, he built churches, a cathedral, a warehouse, a university, a school, houses and castles.

Burges's most notable works are Cardiff Castle, constructed between 1866 and 1928, and Castell Coch , both of which were built for John Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute. Other significant buildings include Gayhurst House, Buckinghamshire , Knightshayes Court , the Church of Christ the Consoler , St Mary's, Studley Royal , in Yorkshire, and Park House, Cardiff .

Many of his designs were never executed or were subsequently demolished or altered. His competition entries for cathedrals at Lille , Adelaide , Colombo, Brisbane , Edinburgh , and Truro were all unsuccessful. He lost out to George Edmund Street in the competition for the Royal Courts of Justice in The Strand. His plans for the redecoration of the interior of St Paul's Cathedral were abandoned and he was dismissed from his post. Skilbeck's Warehouse was demolished in the 1970s, and work at Salisbury Cathedral , at Worcester College, Oxford , and at Knightshayes Court had been lost in the decades before.

Beyond architecture, Burges designed metalwork, sculpture, jewellery, furniture and stained glass. Art Applied to Industry, a series of lectures he gave to the Society of Arts in 1864, illustrates the breadth of his interests; the topics covered including glass, pottery, brass and iron, gold and silver, furniture, the weaver's art and external architectural decoration. For most of the century following his death, Victorian architecture was neither the subject of intensive study nor sympathetic attention and Burges's work was largely ignored. The revival of interest in Victorian art, architecture, and design in the later twentieth century led to a renewed appreciation of Burges and his work. Wikipedia  

✵ 2. December 1827 – 20. April 1881
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William Burges: 20   quotes 0   likes

Famous William Burges Quotes

“The civil engineer is the real 19th century architect.”

William Burges in: The Ecclesiologist, Vol. 28, 1867, p. 156: Cited in Crook (2004)

“Allowing, therefore, the great usefulness of the Government Schools, the Exhibitions, and the Museums both public and private, the question now arises as to what are the impediments to our future progress. The principal ones appear to me to be three.
# A want of a distinctive architecture, which is fatal to art generally.
# The want of a good costume, which is fatal to colour; and
# The want of a sufficient teaching of the figure, which is fatal to art in detail.
It will perhaps be as well to take these one by one.
The most fatal impediment of the three is undeniably the want of a distinctive architecture in the nineteenth century. Architecture is commonly called the mother of all the other arts, and these latter are all more or less affected by it in their details. In almost every age of the world except our own only one style of architecture has been in use, and consequently only one set of details. The designer had accordingly to master, 1. the figure, and the great principles of ornament; 2. those details of the architecture then practised which were necessary to his trade; and 3. the technical processes. Now what is the case in the present day? If we take a walk in the streets of London we may see at least half-a-dozen sorts of architecture, all with different details; and if we go to a museum we shall find specimens of the furniture, jewellery, &c., of these said different styles all beautifully classed and labelled. The student, instead of confining himself to one style as in former times, is expected to be master of all these said half-dozen, which is just as reasonable as asking him to write half-a-dozen poems in half-a-dozen languages, carefully preserving the idiomatic peculiarities of each. This we all know to be an impossibility, and the end is that our student, instead of thoroughly applying the principles of ornament to one style, is so bewildered by having the half-dozen on his hands, that he ends by knowing none of them as he ought to do. This is the case in almost every trade; and until the question of style gets gets settled, it is utterly hopeless to think about any great improvement in modern art.”

Source: Art applied to industry: a series of lectures, 1865, p. 8-9; Partly cited in: Journal of the Royal Society of Arts. Vol. 99. 1951. p. 520

“The great feature of our medieval chamber is the furniture; this, in a rich apartment, would be covered with paintings, both ornaments and subjects; it not only did its duty as furniture, but spoke and told a story.”

Source: Art applied to industry: a series of lectures, 1865, p. 71; Partly cited in: Export of objects of cultural interest 2010/11: 1 May 2010 - 30 April 2011. Stationery Office, 13 dec. 2011

William Burges Quotes about art

“Nothing is more perishable than worn-out apparel, yet, thanks to documentary evidence, to the custom of burying people of high rank in their robes, and to the practice of wrapping up relics of saints in pieces of precious stuffs, we are enabled to form a veiy good idea of what these stuffs were like and where they came from. In the first instance they appear to have come from Byzantium, and from the East generally; but the manufacture afterwards extended to Sicily, and received great impetus at the Norman conquest of that island; Roger I. even transplanting Greek workmen from the towns sacked by his army, and settling them in Sicily. Of course many of the workers would be Mohammedans, and the old patterns, perhaps with the addition of sundry animals, would still continue in use; hence the frequency of Arabic inscriptions in the borders, the Cufic character being one of the most ornamental ever used. In the Hotel de Clu^ny at Paris are preserved the remains of the vestments of a bishop of Bayonne, found when his sepulchre was opened in 1853, the date of the entombment being the twelfth century. Some of these remains are cloth of gold, but the most remarkable is a very deep border ornamented with blue Cufic letters on a gold ground; the letters are fimbriated with white, and from them issue delicate red scrolls, which end in Arabic sort of flowers: this tissue probably is pure Eastern work. On the contrary, the coronation robes of the German emperors, although of an Eastern pattern, bear inscriptions which tell us very clearly where they were manufactured: thus the Cufic characters on the cope inform us that it was made in the city of Palermo in the year 1133, while the tunic has the date of 1181, but then the inscription is in the Latin language. The practice of putting Cufic inscriptions on precious stuffs was not confined to the Eastern and Sicilian manufactures; in process of time other Italian cities took up the art, and, either because it was the fashion, or because they wished to pass off" their own work as Sicilian or Eastern manufacture, imitations of Arabic characters are continually met with, both on the few examples that have come down to us of the stuffs themselves, or on painted statues or sculptured effigies. These are the inscriptions which used to be the despair of antiquaries, who vainly searched out their meaning until it was discovered that they had no meaning at all, and that they were mere ornaments. Sometimes the inscriptions appear to be imitations of the Greek, and sometimes even of the Hebrew. The celebrated ciborium of Limoges work in the Louvre, known as the work of Magister G. Alpais, bears an ornament around its rim which a French antiquary has discovered to be nothing more than the upper part of a Cufic word repeated and made into a decoration.”

Quote was introduced with the phrase:
In the lecture on the weaver's art, we are reminded of the superiority of Indian muslins and Chinese and Persian carpets, and the gorgeous costumes of the middle ages are contrasted with our own dark ungraceful garments. The Cufic inscriptions that have so perplexed antiquaries, were introduced with the rich Eastern stuffs so much sought after by the wealthy class, and though, as Mr. Burges observes
Source: Art applied to industry: a series of lectures, 1865, p. 85; Cited in: " Belles Lettres http://books.google.com/books?id=0EegAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA143" in: The Westminster Review, Vol. 84-85. Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1865. p. 143

“Decidedly the best application of art to industry is when a great many copies are made from an exceedingly good pattern.”

Source: Art applied to industry: a series of lectures, 1865, p. 1

“We have no architecture to work from at all; indeed, we have not even settled the point de depart… our art… is domestic, and… the best way of advancing its progress is to do our best in our own houses… if we once manage to obtain a large amount of art and colour in our sitting-rooms… the improvement may gradually extend to our costume, and perhaps eventually to the architecture of our houses.”

Source: Art applied to industry: a series of lectures, 1865, p. 91-92; Cited in: "William Burges 1827-1881 London Architect" in: In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement http://books.google.com/books?id=56F8Qv96FzwC&pg=PA406. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1 jan. 1986. p. 405

William Burges Quotes

“This may, perhaps, take place in the twentieth century, it certainly, as far as I can see, will not occur in the nineteenth.”

Source: Art applied to industry: a series of lectures, 1865, p. 9; Partly cited in: The New Encyclopaedia Britannica: Macropaedia (19 v.) Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1983. p. 514
Context: At present the fashion appears to have set in in favour of two very distinct styles. One is a very impure and bastard Italian, which is used in most large secular buildings; and the other is a variety of the architecture of the thirteenth century, often, I am sorry to say, not much purer than its rival, especially in the domestic examples, although its use is principally confined to ecclesiastical edifices. It is needless to say that the details of these two styles are as different from each other as light from darkness, but still we are expected to master both of them. But it is most sincerely to be hoped that in course of time one or both of them will disappear, and that we may get something of our own of which we need not be ashamed. This may, perhaps, take place in the twentieth century, it certainly, as far as I can see, will not occur in the nineteenth.

“Use a good strong thick bold line so that we may get into the habit of leaving out those prettinesses which only cost money and spoil our design.”

Attributed to William Burges (1860) paper on architectural drawing in: Sir Reginald Theodore Blomfield (1912) Architectural drawing and draughtsmen https://archive.org/stream/cu31924015419991#page/n25/mode/2up, Cassell & company, limited, 1912. p. 6-7

“The real mission of machinery is to reduce pounds to shillings and shillings to pence.”

Source: Art applied to industry: a series of lectures, 1865, p. 2

“If we copy, the thing never looks right [and] the same occurs with regard to those buildings which do not profess to be copies; both they and the copies want spirit. They are dead bodies… We are at our wits.”

William Burges "Art and Religion", in: The Church and the World: Essays on Questions of the Day, Orby Shipley ed., London, 1868, pp. 574-98; As cited in: John Pemble. Venice rediscovered. Clarendon Press, 16 mrt. 1995. p. 133

“I have been brought up in the 13th century belief, and in that belief I intend to die.”

William Burges The Builder, Vol 34, 1876, p. 18: Cited in: Peter Galloway, The cathedrals of Ireland, 1992, p. 62; Also cited in Crook (2004)

“The thirteenth century, in particular, was Burges’s chosen field, and he modelled his style of draughtsmanship on the famous sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.”

J. Mordaunt Crook, " Burges, William (1827–1881) http://www.oxforddnb.com/templates/article.jsp?articleid=3972&back=&version=2004-09", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004

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