Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin - Reputation and Influence

Reputation and Influence

Eastlake, writing in 1872, noted that the quality of construction in Pugin's buildings was often poor, and believed he was lacking in technical knowledge, his strength laying more in his facility as a designer of architectural detail.

Pugin's legacy began to fade immediately after his death. This was partly due to the hostility of John Ruskin. In his appendix to The Stones of Venice (1851), Ruskin wrote of Pugin, "he is not a great architect but one of the smallest possible or conceivable architects." Contemporaries and admirers of Pugin, including Sir Henry Cole, protested at the viciousness of the attack and pointed out that Ruskin's idea on style had much in common with Pugin's. After Pugin's death, Ruskin "outlived and out-talked him by half a century". Sir Kenneth Clark wrote, "If Ruskin had never lived, Pugin would never have been forgotten."

Nonetheless, Pugin's architectural ideas were carried forward by two young architects who admired him and had attended his funeral, W. E. Nesfield and Norman Shaw. George Gilbert Scott, William Butterfield and George Edmund Street were influenced by Pugin's designs, and continued to work out the implication of ideas he had sketched in his writings. In Street's office, Philip Webb met William Morris and they went on to become leading members of the English Arts and Crafts movement. When the German critic Hermann Muthesius published his admiring and influential study of English domestic architecture, Das Englische Haus (1904), Pugin was all but invisible, yet "it was he... who invented the English House that Muthesius so admired".

On 23 February 2012 the Royal Mail released a first class stamp featuring Pugin as part of its "Britons of Distinction" series. The stamp image depicts an interior view of the Palace of Westminster.