ArchitectureA biography of the most famous British church architect of his age is a reminder of the mark he left on Ireland.
In the early 1970s, Dr Donal Herlihy, the Catholic Bishop of Ferns, often preached in St Aidan's Cathedral, Enniscorthy. Unlike some of his fellow bishops who laid down the law on pressing matters of faith and morals, Bishop Herlihy's themes were the lacrimae rerum and the glories of Latin poetry and Italian light. As the discussion on Ireland's joining the EEC began, however, he joined in the public debate, telling his congregation that the emphasis by politicians was misplaced - Europe was not about housekeeping or economics, he said, Europe was a great cultural dream whose centre was Chartres Cathedral.
He was preaching in a beautiful building, neo-Gothic in style, designed in the second half of the 1840s by the English architect Augustine Welby Pugin; its soaring spire and opulent design, its intricate construction and its mass of detail all took their bearings from the great Gothic churches of France and Germany which Pugin studied carefully throughout his life. Much of the colour and exquisite detail have been, in recent years, restored in the church, allowing the strength of its stone to be lightened as he intended, thus reminding us what a shock it must have been to the Catholic faithful when they saw it first.
In a wonderful essay, written for the centenary of the church, Kathleen O'Flaherty listed those who donated money for the building of the church; a careful study of that list of names shows a rising Catholic merchant class consolidating its power and influence in the face of famine and mass emigration. They wanted the best and most famous church architect of the age.
In these years Pugin designed churches all over Co Wexford, in small places like Barntown, Bree and Tagoat and in larger towns such as Gorey and Enniscorthy, as well as in Killarney, Waterford and Maynooth. It is clear, if you compare his plainer Chapel of St Peter's College in Wexford from 1838, where I also listened to many sermons, to Enniscorthy Cathedral, where Mass was first celebrated in 1846, that Pugin's vision changed the more experienced he became and the longer he worked. But it is unclear from these buildings, which make a miraculous and beautiful connection between the Irish provinces and a great movement in architecture, how little sympathy Pugin had with Ireland, a matter made clear by Rosemary Hill even in the title in her authoritative biography of him.
HE WAS BORN in 1812 to an ambitious English mother and a French father who was a skilled maker of architectural drawings which were as influential in their way in the creation of a hunger in England for the Middle Ages as the novels of Sir Walter Scott.
Pugin began to draw and collect and design at a very young age, making furniture for George IV at Windsor, for example, when he was only 14. He was also stagestruck and in his teens worked at Covent Garden. Throughout his career, as Hill points out, there was a part of him "that would always remain an only child with a toy theatre in the attic".
In the theatre, he learned a great deal about space and spectacle, and it was this, rather than any real interest in dogma or matters of faith, which led to his growing interest in Catholicism and his conversion. Hill establishes his character with complexity and care. He worked all his life with speed and determination and skill; in two years in his mid-20s he built or designed 18 churches, two cathedrals, three convents, two monasteries, several schools and about half a dozen houses. He knew a great deal about material such as metal and stained glass. Both workmen and rich patrons liked him. There was a wonderful restlessness about him, he was constantly learning more about every aspect of his art.
He was also untidy and tactless and, in certain ways, under-educated. He had much in common with that other lone genius of neo-Gothic architecture, the Catalan Antoni Gaudí, who was certainly influenced by his work, and whose socially conservative nature and increasing spirituality also seemed to arise from the very tone of the buildings he made. But, unlike Gaudí, Pugin had a deeply uxorious nature. He was married three times and would have married at least twice more had the women in question and their families not been repelled by his religion or the uncertainty of his social position. Hill makes a convincing case that he suffered from syphilis all of his life.
Hill makes clear that, despite his short life (he died at the age of 40), Pugin did not design in a single style, but one which he constantly refined. His dogmatism, she writes, "never prevented him from changing his mind". She also makes a case for the importance of his domestic work, proving that the houses he built have had an enduring influence. His relationship to Catholicism, to figures such as Newman, who slowly began to take a dim view of him, is also a subject to which she applies great scholarship and subtlety. She is ready to be dazzled by Pugin's best work without losing sight of the social and intellectual context.
But the real triumph of her book is the calm, nuanced and judicious tone she applies to the difficult matter of Pugin's relationship to Charles Barry, who designed the Houses of Parliament after the fire in 1834. A great deal of the detailed work, it is clear, was done by Pugin, who was paid very little money and, at the time, given little credit.
"Barry and Pugin," Hill writes, "were both perfectionists, with different ideas of perfection. Barry's alterations tended to simplify, clarify and secularize what Pugin did . . . he lacked Pugin's technical knowledge and so was unable to visualize a design until it was made. Pugin acceded to Barry's ideas but could not anticipate them."
Barry managed to write Pugin out of the picture while continuing to depend on him. Pugin, most of the time, did not notice who received the glory; he simply got on with the work. "Pugin's architecture," Hill writes, "had an influence on the Catholics of Ireland such as he never achieved in England . . . Yet Pugin never liked or understood Ireland. Like many politically more sophisticated Englishmen, he was often at a loss to fathom the currents of national and religious sentiments flowing through it."
HILL HERSELF, CLEARLY steeped in the period and the milieu in England in which Pugin worked, is careful not to say too much about his work in Ireland. (Rather quaintly, she uses the word "mainland" when she seems to mean England.)
For those of us whose early prayers were said in the churches designed by the man who also (and unarguably) designed Big Ben, for people who first learned to keep time and sit still in churches built by him at great expense in the very worst years of pestilence and famine in Ireland, the story of how these buildings came about remains to be told. Rosemary Hill's book, nonetheless, is a beautifully written work of painstaking scholarship. As a lucid work of architectural history and as the readable biography of a most protean and brilliant man, it is worthy of the best of his buildings.
Colm Tóibín's short story collection, Mothers and Sons, is just out in paperback
God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain By Rosemary Hill Penguin/Allen Lane, 580pp. £30