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Neoclassicism in Britain:
the Adam brothers and Athenian Stuart
RALPH HARRINGTON
The mid-eighteenth century was a period of flux and change for British architecture.
From the early years of the century, Palladianism had been dominant, extolled as the
perfect, universal architectural style; but the years from 1740 to 1760, a period of
instability in politics, aesthetics, and ideas, also saw dynamic change and
experimentation in architecture. The static regularity and perfection which had
underlain the arts of the Augustan age began to produce in reaction a renascence of
imagination and perceptiveness stimulating natural philosophy and romanticism. 1
This was an age when Britain was open to new architectural influences from a wide
variety of sources; interior decoration and ornament came infected with the spirit of
the continental rococo, and enthusiasm for exotic and revived antique styles
Chinese, Gothic, Tudor underlined the accepted standards of classicism with a new
spirit of eclecticism and experiment. It was against this background that James
Athenian Stuart (1713-1788) and the Adam brothers, most prominently Robert
Adam (1728-1792), developed their interpretations of classical architecture and
decoration.
The degree of success achieved by Adam and Stuart in disseminating their
particular styles during their careers differed greatly. Adam was productive,
fashionable and influential, while Stuarts productiveness was very limited and he
remained a comparatively minor figure in contemporary architecture: as an architect,
Stuart failed to make the most of his opportunities The success of the brothers
Adam in popularising their architectural innovations is the measure of [Stuarts]
failure to do the same.2 As will be discussed below, the sharply different characters
of Stuart and Adam were of considerable importance in shaping their respective
1 Christopher Hussey, English Country Houses: Early Georgian, 1715-1760 (London: Country Life,
1955; rev. edn. 1965), p. 26.
2 Howard Colvin, Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600-1840 (London: John Murray, 1978),
p. 795.
RALPH HARRINGTON
Neoclassicism in Britain
careers; but the nature of the styles of architecture each expounded, and the
relationships of those styles to the contemporary background, were also vital factors.
For both James Stuart and Robert Adam, the investigation of surviving ancient
architecture was the foundation of their work. Stuart became involved in a scheme to
survey and record the surviving monuments of ancient Greece after meeting
Nicholas Revett and other English travellers in Italy, and becoming associated with
the Society of Dilettante. A proposal describing the project was issued in 1748, and
Stuart travelled with Revett to Greece in 1751 to begin the survey, returning to
England in 1755. Robert Adam, at about the same time, was in Italy on his Grand
Tour; in 1757 he surveyed the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Split in Dalmatia,
returning to London in 1758. The discoveries of contemporary archaeology were an
influence of increasing importance on the architecture of the period, and both James
Stuart and Robert Adam, with a store of new ideas based on the surviving
architecture of the ancient world at a time when new ideas were in demand, had the
potential to exert considerable influence on the architectural taste of their age.
The Adam style, as it developed over the course of the late eighteenth century,
made sophisticated use of motifs and patterns from a wide range of sources,
combining the fruits of recent archaeological investigations with decoration from
renaissance, baroque and contemporary styles. The discovery, particularly at Pompeii
and Herculaneum, of the circumstances of ancient Roman domestic architecture,
decoration and artefacts was of particular importance to the Adams in creating a
complex and highly adaptable scheme of integrated interior decoration and furniture
design of a specifically domestic classical character. The Adams were severely criticised
by some for their gingerbread and sippets of embroidery (Horace Walpole) and
filigrane toy work (William Chambers),3 but the success of their style was
widespread and immediate.
James Stuarts work proceeded at an altogether slower pace. The proposal for
their publication of The Antiquties of Athens had initially raised a great deal of interest,
but the schedule for the project had been overly optimistic, and the ultimate
realisation of the scheme failed to fulfil expectations, blunting the impact of Stuarts
ideas. The length of time the work to appear reduced interest: volume I did not
appear until 1762, seven years after the authors return to London, and in failing to
cover any of the great monuments of Athens, being restricted instead to minor
3 Horace Walpole, letter to the Countess of Ossory, 17 September 1785, in Letters Addressed to the
Countess of Ossory, From the Year 1769 to 1797 (2nd edn., 2 vols., London: Richard Bentley, 1848),
vol. 2, p. 246 (often misquoted as snippets); William Chambers, A Treatise on the Decorative Part of
Civil Architecture (London: Priestley & Weale, 1825), vol. 2, p. 392.
RALPH HARRINGTON
Neoclassicism in Britain
RALPH HARRINGTON
Neoclassicism in Britain
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Neoclassicism in Britain
8 David Watkin, Athenian Stuart (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982), p. 13.
9 John Summerson, The Architecture of the Eighteenth Century (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969), p.
263.
10 J. Mordaunt Crook, The Greek Revival (London: John Murray, 1972), p. 72.
RALPH HARRINGTON
Neoclassicism in Britain
who were jaded with Palladianism and had begun to learn that Rome itself must not
be considered the paragon of classical perfection. 11
There can be no doubt that Stuart failed to fulfil expectations during his lifetime,
and today he is seen as a relatively minor, if interesting, figure. During the first half
of the nineteenth century, however, estimation of Athenian Stuart was much higher;
Joseph Gwilt, in his influential Encyclopedia of Architecture (1842), saw Stuarts
influence as beneficial in returning classical architecture to its pure sources in the
civilization of Greece and reversing the trend towards the degenerate styles of
Imperial Rome. Gwilt praised the chasteness and purity of Stuarts style which had
had to contend against the opposite and vicious taste of Robert Adam, a fashionable
architect whose eye been ruined by the corruption of the worst period of Roman
art.12 As late as 1854, Owen Jones could claim that Stuart and Revett had generated
a mania for Greek architecture, from which we are barely yet recovered.13 Seen from
the first half of the nineteenth century, a period which had been dominated by the
Greek Revival, Stuarts work took on more significance; his continuing importance
throughout this period can be judged from the fact that new editions of The
Antiquities of Athens were published in 1825, 1837, 1841, 1849 and 1858. A modern
scholar has echoed these nineteenth-century views by writing of Stuart that it was
he, more than anyone else, who opened mens eyes to the dignity and merit of Greek
architecture.14 It can be argued that it was Stuart rather than Adam who breathed
fresh life and vigour into classicism, giving the Greek style an energy which was to
sustain it into the 1860s. Considered in a longer perspective his role in laying the
foundations of the Greek revival gives his work more long-term significance in terms
of the development of neoclassicism in Britain from the beginning of the nineteenth
century to the beginning of the twentieth than the transiently fashionable designs of
Robert Adam.
Ralph Harrington 2005.
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11 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press), p. 314.
12 Joseph Gwilt, Encyclopedia of Architecture (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1842), p.
224.
13 Quoted in Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1980), p. 11.
14 Watkin, Athenian Stuart, p. 13.