James Wyatt - Gothic Architecture

Gothic Architecture

Meanwhile, Wyatt's reputation as a rival to Robert Adam had been eclipsed by his celebrity as a Gothic architect. Every Georgian architect was called upon from time to time to produce designs in the medieval style, and Wyatt was by no means the first in the field. However, whereas his predecessors had merely Gothicized their elevations by the addition of battlements and pointed windows, Wyatt went further and exploited to the full the picturesque qualities of medieval architecture by irregular grouping and the addition of towers and spires to his silhouettes. Never, indeed, have the romantic possibilities of Gothic architecture been more strikingly demonstrated than they were by Wyatt at Fonthill Abbey and Ashridge; and although crude in scale and often unscholarly in detail, these houses are among the landmarks of the Gothic revival in England. In his lifetime Wyatt enjoyed the reputation of having "revived in this country the long forgotten beauties of Gothic architecture", but the real importance of his Gothic work lay in the manner in which it bridged the gap between the rococo Gothic of the mid 18h century and the serious medievalism of the early 19th century.

Of his cathedral restorations, inspired as they were by the mistaken idea that a medieval church ought to be homogeneous in style and unencumbered by screens, monuments, and other obtrusive relics of the past, it can only be said that the Chapters who employed him were no more enlightened than their architect, and that at Westminster Abbey at least he accomplished an urgent work of repair in an unexceptionable manner. His activities at Salisbury, Durham, Hereford, and Lichfield were bitterly criticized by John Carter in his Pursuits of Architectural Innovation, and it was due in large measure to Carter's persistent denunciation that, in 1796, Wyatt failed to secure election as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. In the following year, however, he was permitted to add F.S.A. to his name by a majority of one hundred and twenty-three votes.

Wyatt was elected to the Royal Academy in 1785, and took an active part in the politics of the Academy. In 1803 he was one of the members of the Council which attempted to assert its independence of the General Assembly of Academicians, and when the resultant dissensions led West to resign the Presidency in the following year, it was Wyatt who was elected to take his place. But his election was never formally approved by the King, and in the following year he appears to have acquiesced in West's resumption of office. Wyatt was one of the founders of the Architects' Club in 1791, and sometimes presided at its meetings at the Thatched House Tavern.

In 1802 Wyatt built a new house for the 7th Earl of Bridgewater on the Ashridge estate in Hertfordshire which is now a Grade 1 listed building. In 1803 Thomas Johnes hired Wyatt to design Saint Michel's Hafod Church, Eglwys Newydd, in Ceredigion, Wales.