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Gothic Architecture Illustrated: the Drawings of Thomas Rickman in New York

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 April 2011

Megan Aldrich
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Extract

In the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library of Columbia University in New York is an interleaved second (1819) edition of Thomas Rickman's An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture. This volume contains sixty-six relatively unknown illustrations of medieval architecture in Rickman's hand which can be dated to the later 1830s. It was discovered that many of these drawings in the Avery Library were either traced outright or modelled after plates from well-known contemporary works on architecture, in particular the works of John Britton. There is reason to think that Rickman may have purchased the rights to Britton 's plates and other sources, revised them, and had intended to reprint them as lithographs to illustrate afifth edition of An Attempt.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Antiquaries Journal , Volume 65 , Issue 2 , September 1985 , pp. 427 - 433
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1985

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References

Notes

1 See Notes on the Life and on the Several Imprints of the Work of Thomas Rickman (London, 1901),Google Scholar by his son, Thomas Miller Rickman; Colvin, H., A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600-1840 (London, 1978), 688–93;Google ScholarBaily, J., ‘Thomas Rickman: the Early Years to 1818’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Leeds, 1977Google Scholar; Colley, E. D., ‘The Life and Works of Thomas Rick-man’, unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Manchester, 1972Google Scholar.

2 Respectively in Whiffen, M., ‘Rickman and Cambridge’, Architect. Review, xcvii-xcviii (December 1945), 160–2; andGoogle ScholarPevsner, N. and Wedgwood, A., The Buildings of England: Warwickshire (Harmondsworth, 1966), 305–6.Google Scholar

3 The first (1817) to fourth (1835) editions were published in London by Longmans; the fifth (1848) to seventh (1881) editions in London and Oxford by J. H. Parker. For a definitive history of the editions, see Rickman, , op. cit. (note 1), 59–89.Google Scholar A number of Rickman's drawings and notebooks also survive (see Colvin, , op. cit. (note 1), 690),Google Scholar and he contributed several articles to Archaeologia during the 1830s, e.g. ‘Four letters on the ecclesiastical architecture of France and England’, Archaeologia, xv (1833), 159–87; andGoogle Scholar ‘Further observations on the ecclesiastical architecture of France and England’, ibid, xvi (1836), 26-46.

4 The Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library of Columbia University, New York, Ref. AA 445 R42 copy 2. There is no mention of these drawings in Colvin's Dictionary; the only published notice appears in Harris, J., A Catalogue of British Drawings for Architecture, Decoration, Sculpture and Landscape Gardening, 1550-1900, in American Collections (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 1971), 180.Google Scholar The drawings were originally catalogued by Michael McCarthy, F.S.A., in 1978; Robert Belton correlated the drawings with the text of An Attempt in 1980.Google Scholar The catalogue of the drawings was revised and updated by the present writer as an appendix to ‘Thomas Rickman (1776-1841) and Architectural Illustration of the Gothic Revival’, unpublished M.Phil, thesis, University of Toronto, 1983Google Scholar.

5 I am indebted to Herbert Mitchell of the Avery Library for this and other information concerning the volume.

6 p. iv.

7 The Architectural Antiquities of Great Britain, v (London, 1827), 94Google Scholar.

8 The third edition of 1825 features a new frontispiece. Most of the drawings for these plates are now in the R.I.B.A. Drawings Collection, location number H3/51, drawings 1-12.

9 This terminology was formulated by Rick-man.

10 B.L. Add. MS 37803, Drawings 73 and 74.

11 See note 8.

12 Bodleian MSS Top. eccles. c. 3-4. The paper in the books bears watermarks from 1817 to 1822, mostly of the latter date.

13 Bodleian MS Dep. b. 140. The paper used for these drawings bears watermarks of 1827 to 1832. Most of these drawings are in Rickman's own hand, but a few are by his brother, Edwin, his clerk, John Johnstone, his partner, R. C. Hussey, and one or two may have been the work of his colleague and travelling companion, William Whewell. (From a letter by Thomas Miller Rickman to the President of the Oxford Architectural and Historical Society, 18th April 1901, filed with the Bodleian drawings.)

14 See note 3, ‘Four letters’, pls. X, XII, XV and XVI; the plates were engraved by Basire after drawings by Rickman and published by the Society of Antiquaries in 1833.

15 Britton in fact referred to An Attempt at some length in a discussion of the nomenclature of the styles and means of distinguishing Saxon, and architecture, Norman, op. cit. (note 7),Google Scholar preface and ch. 1.

16 Here use of the term ‘traced’ signifies that Rickman's illustration exactly corresponds in subject, measurement and features to the published plate cited as its source.

17 Retention' because the card catalogue entry for this volume in the Avery Library refers to ‘drawings’ by Rickman, as does the entry in Harris, , op. cit. (note 4), 180.Google Scholar

18 Cathedral Antiquities of England (London, 1814-1835), i–v;Google Scholar and The History and Antiquities of the Cathedral Church of Lincoln (London, 1837).Google Scholar

19 Drawing 16 has been inscribed by Rickman ‘Litchfield west door way’ and closely resembles the title page of vol. III of Storer's, Graphic and Historical Description of the Cathedrals of Great Britain (London, 1817)Google Scholar.

20 The Architectural Antiquities of Normandy (London, 1822)Google Scholar.

21 Rajnai, M., John Sell Cotman: Drawings of Normandy in the Norwich Castle Museum (Norfolk Museums Service, 1975), 93.Google Scholar The sale catalogue cites drawings of ‘subjects in Normandy, which have never been engraved, a few of the original drawings for the plates published in Mr. Cotman's Norman Antiquities, and many beautiful miscellaneous subjects’ (ibid., 100).

22 Specimens of Architectural Remains in Various Counties in England, with architectural observations by Rickman, Thomas (London, 1838).Google Scholar

23 In 1812 Rickman had accepted books as payment from the iron-founder John Cragg, for whom he designed several churches: Rickman, , op. cit. (note 1), 38Google Scholar.

24 Ibid., 58.

25 Ibid., 52.

26 Ibid., 57.

27 Crook, J. Mordaunt, ‘John Britton and the genesis of the Gothic Revival’, in Summerson, J. (ed.), Concerning Architecture: Essays on Architectural Writers and Writing Presented to Nikolaus Pevsner (London, 1968), 114–15Google Scholar.

28 Rickman, , op. cit. (note 1), 46Google Scholar.

29 Twyman, , Lithography, 1800-1850 (London, 1970), 16 and 103Google Scholar.