THE WORK OF ERNEST NEWTON
THE active career of Ernest Newton covered forty-three years, and his work was always typical of the best that was being done in any one of them. It was intensely English and domestic, and it reflected exactly the changing fashions of the best architectural thought .of his day. He entered Norman Shaw's office in 1878, and before he left it the Gothic revival, in the sense that its protagonists wished thatexPreision to have, was dead. It waii no loner felt neeesiary that eveiy building should he a more, or leis close imitation of,the archi- tecture of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and that anything else was both in-English and, worse, unchristian, The Prince Consort, a man or rare intelligence, never fell under the revivalists' spell, but then he was not particularly English. But although by 1880 the revival was at its last gasp, the speculative builder, always behind the times, mhning op his—to quote from Mr. W. Newton's preface—" rows of hard houses with stone bow windows decorated with ivy foliage capitals. . . . We are all familiar with the vernacular suburban house of the period, its walls of yellow brick diver- sified with bands,. of red, its pointed. `.,ivitylowi Ailed With plate-glass ; • its purple Slates with trimmings of mauVe; Its roof ridge jagged with cresting against the sky." The advance on this sort of thing that Ernest Newton's work showed is indeed prodigious. He and the best of his con. temporaries built solidly with much feeling for good brickwork and texture and, though _they were still afraid of anything definitely classical in tendency,.gradually
Queen Annish cornices began to creep in. The interiors, however, remained .
"artful and crafty." It is interesting to a student of meld. tectural history to watch in these pages the gradual tightening up of Newton's manner. In the 'nineties a contemporary critic complained of a tendency to overdo "a wholesome plainness." The houses of this date look anything but plain to us now, but in three great houses, at Burgh Heath, Kings. wood and Goring respectively, dating from just before the War, Newton is as severe and symmetrical as anyone could wish. These houses and the architect's last work, the Hall at Uppingham school, are typical of English architecture of the last fifteen years at its very best, just as his Norman Shaw cum William Morris manner of the 'eighties exactly satisfied the best minds of that generation. Who can tell which our great-grandchildren will prefer ?
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