Originally published in A.W.N. Pugin, Master of Gothic Revival, edited by Paul Atterburg. New Haven and London: Published for the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, New York by Yale University Press, 1995. 161-75.

From the exhibition: A.W.N. Pugin: Master of Gothic Revival.

Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, whose ideas may seem at first glance to be rooted in the Middle Ages, was actually a child of the Industrial Revolution, sharing his generation’s enthusiasm for innovation and progress. By 1812, the year of his birth, every aspect of Britain’s manufacturing industry was undergoing a rapid transformation through the introduction of steam and water power, the sophisticated use of the principles of division of labor, and the development of new materials and processes. The products of the factories and workshops were being transported throughout Britain over an extensive network of canals, and by the time Pugin was established as a designer, trains and steamships were taking British products all over the world.

Britain was also benefiting, as so often in its history, from an influx of European emigrés fleeing from political persecution. As Napoleon’s armies overran mainland Europe, artists, craftsmen, and inventors flocked to Britain. Pugin’s father, Auguste Charles Pugin, was among those who left Paris to settle in London, arriving by 1792. Continental inventors were to play an important part in the innovations taking place in industry. Marc Isambard Brunel, for instance, another Frenchman and a friend of A. C. Pugin, arrived in England in 1799 and revolutionized the shipyards with his rigging-block manufacturing machine. Brunel also made the boring of the first Thames tunnel. In the 1840s, his son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, with his own improvements to steamships and railways, played as great a role in revolutionizing transport as A. W. N. Pugin was to do in the fields of architecture and design. Similarly, in the fields of illustration, printing, and publishing, a German emigré, Rudolph Ackermann, was introducing Continental innovations to Britain and using them in collaboration with the two Pugins, father and son.

Far from opposing the railways as a modern invention, A. W. N. Pugin, as his diaries show, used them constantly. Indeed, he could not have produced the volume of work he did without traveling thousands of miles a year by rail. His friend and fellow architect, Benjamin Ferrey, who was also his biographer, described how Pugin found amusement in his fellow passengers: He was in the habit of wearing a sailor’s jacket, loose pilot trousers, jack-boots, and a wide awake hat. In such a costume landing on one occasion from the Calais boat, he entered, as was his custom, a first class carriage, and was accosted with a “Halloa, my man you have mistaken I think your carriage.” “By Jove,” was his reply, “I think your [sic] right; I thought I was in the company of gentlemen.” This cutting repartée at once called forth an apology. The remainder of his journey was most agreeably passed in examining his portfolio filled with sketches just taken in Normandy.1

Though Pugin never had the opportunity to design a railway station, he applied his pragmatic mind to determining the form of architecture—that of medieval military buildings—which would be most appropriate to the railways. In 1843 he illustrated a “railway bridge on the ancient principles,” stating that:

The Railways, had they been naturally treated, afforded a fine scope for grand massive architecture. Little more was required than buttresses, weathering, and segmental arches, resistance to lateral and perpendicular pressure. I do not hesitate to say that, by merely following out the work that was required to its natural conclusion, building exactly what was wanted in the simplest and most substantial manner—mere construction, as the old men weathered the flanking walls of their defences—tens of thousands of pounds could have been saved on every line and grand and durable masses of building been produced.2

In his book, An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England, Pugin took a similarly progressive view of the use of machinery and new technologies in manufacture and building: There is no reason why noble cities, combining all possible convenience of drainage, water-course and conveyance of gas may not be erected. … In matters purely mechanical, the Christian architect should gladly avail himself of those improvements and increased facilities that are suggested from time to time. The steam engine is a most valuable power for sawing, raising, and cleansing stone, timber, and other materials. … It is only when mechanical invention intrudes on the confines of art, and tends to subvert the principles which it would advance, that it becomes objectionable.3

Although the title of the book naturally leads one to assume that it is deeply conservative, praising the architecture of the Middle Ages, Pugin had a far more positive and pragmatic attitude toward the use of machines than would theorists of the next generation, such as John Ruskin and William Morris. Pugin’s books and letters reveal that he had no particular regard for handcraftsmanship or, indeed, for the happiness and well-being of the craftsmen. For him it was the character and appearance of the finished object that was crucial. If it possessed what he habitually called “the true thing” in quality of design and execution, then he had achieved his end. The means were of little importance.

Pugin had a thorough understanding of the nature of craftsmanship, of what might be achieved and how. In the late 1820s, while still in his teens, he had spent a great deal of time in the workshops of the celebrated London cabinetmakers, Morel and Seddon, overseeing the manufacture of furniture he was designing for Windsor Castle.4 In 1829 he set up his own workshop in Covent Garden: “determined to have all carved work, whenever it was possible, executed under his own eye … and having secured the assistance of one or two clever carvers whom he had himself already taught, he made it known generally amongst his friends that he would undertake to supply all the ornamental portions of a building which could be executed apart from the structure and be fixed afterwards.”5 This small firm also made furniture, although only two pieces, stamped “A. PUGIN,” have been discovered. A number of designs by Pugin survive, but none of the actual pieces relating to these designs have yet been discovered.6

Pugin’s close observation of craftsmen at work and his constant examination of medieval architecture and the applied arts gave him a clear idea of the standards that might be achieved. He collected medieval works of fine and applied art and built up a remarkable library of ancient books and manuscripts, giving him an even greater depth of knowledge. It was his determined application of this expertise to the improvement of architecture and design that makes him a pioneer of the design reform movement. He set forth his major tenets as early as 1841 in The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture, one of the most influential treatises in English on architecture and design of the nineteenth century along with John Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture.7 Ruskin’s book may be more wide-ranging in scope, but it was not published until 1849 and owes a great deal to True Principles. Pugin wrote:

The two great rules for design are these: 1st, that there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction, or propriety; 2nd, that all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building. The neglect of these two rules is the cause of all the bad architecture of the present time … the smallest detail should have a meaning or serve a purpose; and even the construction itself should vary with the material employed, and the designs should be adapted to the material in which they are executed.8

These arguments are about the appropriate use of ornament and truth to materials, not about hand-craftsmanship versus the machine, and the principles adumbrated here were intended by Pugin to apply to the whole of architecture and design. Following the publication of True Principles and An Apology, and needing skilled craftsmen and efficient manufacturing techniques for the fixtures, fittings, and decorative details that he was then designing for the New Palace of Westminster, Pugin turned to the pupils at the new Government School of Design at Somerset House. He found, however, that the pupils there were not properly trained for his needs, and in 1845 he wrote to The Builder, the leading architectural periodical:

I have almost given up hope of seeing any real good effected by the School of Design which ought and which (I feel assured) might be made the most powerful and effective way of creating a school of national artists, not mere imitators of any style, but men imbued with a thorough knowledge of the history, wants, climate, and customs of our country; who would combine all the spirit of the mediaeval architects and the beauties of the old Christian artists, with the practical improvements of our times.9

Here Pugin is arguing for effective design education combined with modern manufacturing methods. Indeed, he was using steam-driven carving machines at Westminster. As a result of the campaign in which Pugin’s letter played an important part, his friend Henry Cole, the design theorist and reformer who was later to be the first director of the South Kensington Museum, was eventually brought in to reform the school and its provincial branches. In a paper entitled “Recent Progress in Design as Applied to Manufacture” which was read to the Society of Arts in London on March 12, 1856, George Wallis, Headmaster of the Government School of Design in Birmingham, was to pay tribute to Pugin’s influence on manufactures: … the influence that one mind alone undoubtedly exercised not only upon the particular department of art to which he specially devoted his attention, but indeed upon all of a kindred character, in which other minds were engaged who could appreciate his arguments and apply the principles he enunciated … his special views of the mission of art, and the application of modern scientific and mechanical means to the reproduction of works of excellence, his earnest and fearless denunciation of all “shams”—his exposure of false systems of ornamentation—his thoroughly zealous working out “in season and out of season” of his own views in his own way must ever command the respect of every true and earnest lover of art, since it is to the influence of his example in one direction that we owe so much to the progress to be recorded in other departments of art—manufacture.10

Wallis was an expert on contemporary manufactures and manufacturing techniques and thus an important commentator. He had been one of the commissioners of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, held in 1851 at London’s Crystal Palace, and also of another exhibition at New York’s Crystal Palace held in 1853. While in America he had looked closely at machine production. Not only did he deplore the fact that in 1853 the “ordinary class of useful and cheap furniture, so largely manufactured in the western states, was not represented in the exhibition,” but he even brought back to England a piece of American machine-made furniture. In 1857 Wallis became a keeper at the South Kensington Museum which was to become the Victoria & Albert Museum.11

Pugin worked on designs in several media. Early in his career, in 1826 or the beginning of 1827, he was involved in the manufacture of precious metalwork, a valuable experience: His first employment, independent of his father, seems to have been given to young Pugin by the celebrated goldsmiths, Messrs Rundell and Bridge. One of the firm, while engaged in an examination of some ancient designs for plate in the Print Room of the British Museum, chanced to notice that he [Pugin] was employed in copying the prints of Albert Dürer and Israel Silvester. Struck by his skill in drawing the goldsmith accosted him, and soon found that he possessed the genius his firm had been seeking. His complete knowledge of mediaeval art fitted him admirably for designing plate in the old manner.12

Rundell Bridge & Rundell were the royal goldsmiths, and from them Pugin learned first-hand how one of the highest quality workshops in England operated. His association with the firm dates for certain to March 19, 1827, for he recorded that on that day he “Attended with Mr. J. Bridge the sale of the Duke of York’s plate at Christie’s Rooms.”13 Several designs for plate by Pugin, probably for the king himself, exist from this period, but only one object of this date can be attributed to him with any certainty. This is the so-called Coronation Cup, a silver-gilt standing cup set with enamels, diamonds, and other precious stones. It bears the mark of John Bridge and the date letter for 1826-27. In the Gothic Revival style, with a stem in the form of a twisted tree trunk, it was inspired by a Dürer drawing of a cup with a similar stem that was in the British Museum Print Room where Pugin was seen copying. The cup, which is still in the Royal Collection, is the most spectacular piece of late Georgian Gothic metalwork extant.14 The techniques habitually used by Rundells and their contemporaries—those that were used for the royal cup—were soon to disgust Pugin. He found them dishonest compared to the techniques used by the medieval and Renaissance goldsmiths. He particularly disliked cast ornaments in any material, whether precious or base metals or plaster:

Putty pressing, plaster and iron casting for ornaments, wood burning & c., are not to be rejected because such methods were unknown to our ancestors, but on account of their being opposed in their very nature to the true principles of art and design—by substituting monotonous repetitions for beautiful variety, flatness of execution for bold relief, encouraging cheap and false magnificence, and reducing the varied principles of ornamental design. … But while on the other hand, we should utterly reject the use of casting as substitutes for ornamental sculpture, we should eagerly avail ourselves of the great improvements in working metals for constructive purposes.15

It is important to read Pugin’s arguments in the context of the metalwork that he actually commissioned to be made from his designs for his many clients. A key phrase is “monotonous repetition,” by which he means repeating the design by mass producing a casting many times. If one looks at the immense surviving corpus of his precious metalwork and jewelry, the same forms and motifs turn up over and over again but are rarely used in precisely the same combination or material. There is great variety, yet all the objects relate in style and technique to each other, like the medieval pieces that inspired them.

Workshops such as Rundell, Bridge & Rundell were organized with a very sophisticated division of labor in which groups of craftsmen specialized in different techniques such as enameling or chasing and passed a particular piece from one specialist to another as it moved toward completion. By this means, mass production is achieved in terms of numbers of objects produced each day, but variation in appearance, material, and construction between one object and another is easily achieved within profit constraints. It is important to differentiate between the form of mass production and machine production. In the latter, every object produced is identical and variety is impossible. The question of how to achieve variety at acceptable cost in order to supply the new mass market was a vital issue throughout Europe and America in the 1840s and 1850s. Wallis in his 1856 lecture, four years after Pugin’s death, argued:

If modern art, whether applied to industry or the higher illustrations of the power of the beautiful, is ever to make a distinct place for itself in the coming time, it will be out of the wise and perfect use of those mechanical means and appliances with which an All-wise Providence has seen fit to furnish mankind for their use in this age; and it is fearlessly asserted, that he is a negligent worker in the present, and a betrayer of the interests of the future, who does not avail himself of every means which modern invention and discovery affords him to reproduce, in suitable form and material, such beautiful objects of art-manufacture as shall tend to the refinement and instruction of his fellow-men.16

Not everyone in his audience agreed, and in the discussion which followed the lecture Ruskin aired those misgivings about industry that were to lead to the handcraftsmanship ethos of that design cul-de-sac, the Arts and Crafts movement. “In no way, therefore could good art ever become cheap in production. … The paper seemed to dwell wholly upon the advantage of art to the consumer, or only to the producer as a mercantile matter. He was sorry it did not show the effect of the production of art on the workman; surely the happiness of the workman was a thing which ought to be considered.”17

Pugin knew full well (as his letters amply demonstrate) the reality of having to run a business to make a profit while also making a product to a high standard. The open-minded approach taken by Pugin and John Hardman, his metalworker, close friend, and collaborator as well as fellow Catholic, is clearly stated in a letter that Hardman wrote in 1840 or 1841 to a client in London: My general working method is this, either parties come to see the articles I have by me and purchase from them or otherwise they say what they want and how much they can afford to give and trust Mr Pugin or me to send them as much as can possibly be done for the money—it is possible to make so much difference in all these articles by adding engraving and chasing or leaving it out as the case may be, adding or taking away other work.18

In True Principles Pugin might almost have been describing the elaborately decorated work of Rundells themselves when he compared the techniques of the ancient craftsmen with those of his own period. He began by praising the early techniques: Their construction and execution is decidedly of a metallic character. The ornament is produced by piercing, chasing, engraving and enamel; many of the parts were first formed of thin plates of metal, and then shaped by the pliers. … Silversmiths are no longer artists; they manufacture fiddle headed spoons, punchy racing cups, cumbersome tureens and wine-coolers; their vulgar salvers are covered with sprawling rococo, edged with a confused pattern of such universal use that it may be called with propriety Sheffield eternal. Cruet-stand, tea-pot, candlestick, butter-boat, tray, waiter, tea-urn, are all bordered with this in and out shell-and-leaf pattern, which, being struck with a die, does not even possess the merit of relief.19

Almost all of Pugin’s metalwork, both precious and base, was made by John Hardman’s firm. Pugin had first met Hardman in 1837, by which time Hardman was already well established in Birmingham as a button manufacturer. Until his association with Pugin, however, his products fitted into a category that Pugin was to attack in True Principles as “Brumagen” Gothic20 from “those inexhaustible mines of bad taste, Birmingham.”

Under Pugin’s artistic control Hardman’s firm was transformed and moved from metalwork into stained glass, producing large numbers of remarkable windows to Pugin’s design. By 1847 the Council of the Government School of Design reported that: “There is an establishment in Birmingham in which art is really cultivated—Hardman’s, for the manufacture of Church ornaments and plate; but the designs are supplied by Mr. Pugin. It is not to be expected that manufacturers who supply the ordinary market can elaborate their works like Mr. Hardman; but whatever is done, may be done well in its degree.”21

Hardman’s manufacturing extended far beyond church work—though this was a sizable market, given the dozens of churches built to Pugin’s design as well as the metalwork and glass ordered for other churches throughout Britain and in countries as far afield as Australia. The firm made splendid examples of domestic metalwork, such as a silver cream jug with saw-pierced and engraved work22 made in July 1852. It bears the crest of Charles Lygon Cocks, who was later to employ William Burges to build Treverbyn Vean, a splendid Gothic Revival house in Cornwall. (His relations, the Somers Cocks, had employed Pugin to design several interiors at Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire.) The enameled silver candlestick, which dates from 1842, was made for Henry Bagshawe and bears his initial. This is an early example of Hardman’s use of the newly perfected technique of electroplating pioneered in Birmingham by Elkington and Co. to whom Hardman contracted out work. Hardman and Pugin were to make frequent use of electroplating. Hardman manufactured light fittings in the form of candlesticks, candle chandeliers, gasoliers, and oil fittings in brass and iron. The firm also made the whole range of hinges and door and fireplace furniture such as splendid firedogs made for Bilton Grange around 1841.

The same principles that Pugin used in the manufacture of metalwork and adumbrated in True Principles also apply to the manufacture of objects in other media, notably textiles, wallpaper, tiles, stained glass, and woodwork. His ability to combine simplicity, honest construction, and modern production methods, resulting in objects of great beauty, is nowhere more fully realized than in his designs for tables. In 1849 Pugin wrote to John G. Crace, who was to make these tables, “the great sale will be to the middling class. … You ought to frame a dozen of each to make them pay & keep them ready seasoned for putting together at a days notice, keeping one of a sort always on show … I am anxious to induce a sensible style of furniture of good oak & constructively put together that shall compete with the vile trash made and sold.” As his celebrated follower, the architect G. E. Street, observed the year after Pugin’s death, his furniture was: not Gothic certainly in the ordinary cabinet-makers sense: that is to say, his chairs were constructed without the assistance of pointed arches, and his tables did not depend upon crockets, finials and flying buttresses for all their character, but they were real, simple, and properly constructional provisions for certain wants, with no more material consumed in their construction than was necessary for their solidity, and no sham or incongruous ornaments.23

Pugin’s unerring eye for pattern and color enabled him to adapt natural forms appropriately to produce brilliantly innovative flat pattern which would lay the foundations on which designers of the next generation such as Christopher Dresser, Owen Jones, and William Morris were to build so successfully. Pugin’s pattern was immediately applicable to mass-produced artifacts such as wallpapers, textiles, and wall and floor tiles. Not only did he design in all these media, but in 1849 he published Floriated Ornament, the seminal work on the subject. As an innovator in the field of mass book production he also produced the illustrations and designed its machine-stamped binding.24 In the introduction he wrote that “nature supplied the mediaeval artists with all their forms and ideas; the same inexhaustible source is open to us. If we go to the fountainhead, we shall produce a multitude of beautiful designs treated in the same spirit as the old, but new in form. We have the advantage of many important botanical discoveries which were unknown to our ancestors; and surely it is in accordance with the true principles of art to avail ourselves of all that is beautiful for the composition of our designs.”25 Here again Pugin is enthusiastically embracing modern discoveries when he could well have confined his designs to the plant ornament known in the Middle Ages.

His wallpapers, tiles, and textiles bear ample witness to how effectively he applied this theory to his own designs. In 1851 came the culmination of Pugin’s progress in promoting the manufacture of objects in all media for domestic and ecclesiastical use, by firms he had encouraged and trained. He was already a friend of Henry Cole, the principal mover of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and was able to persuade Cole to arrange for him to be allotted a prime area in the Crystal Palace. This was the Mediaeval Court, and the objects displayed in it were designed by Pugin and made by his favorite firms—Herbert Minton for tiles, John Hardman for stained glass and metalwork, and George Myers and John Crace for furniture. The objects ranged from expensive and elaborate “one-off” pieces of furniture to mass-produced ceramics sold at the exhibition in large numbers. The exhibit was very popular with visitors: “While studying architecture Pugin was equally zealous and successful in his cultivation of the arts subordinate to it. To painted glass and medieval metalwork he devoted particular attention, and under his directing care Mr. Hardman, of Birmingham, established his beautiful ateliers in these two branches of art. Among the numerous courts of the Crystal Palace few attracted more attention and gave more delight than Pugin’s ‘Mediaeval Court’ rich in these departments.”26

Before the Great Exhibition was over Cole knew that he was soon to become the director of a new museum, The Museum of Manufactures—ancestor of the Victoria & Albert Museum—which was also to include the Government School of Design. This was excellent news for Pugin who, as we have seen, was critical of the teaching at the school. He was also particularly delighted that the government had voted £5,000 to purchase modern manufactures for the museum from the Great Exhibition.27 A committee was set up, consisting of Cole, Richard Redgrave (his colleague at the museum), Owen Jones, and Pugin. They spent £865 lls. 5d. on British objects, £1276 ls. on Indian ones, and £2075 9s. on objects from other countries, buying 244 objects in all. These were all modern, manufactured objects especially chosen to inspire the pupils of the School of Design. Several objects were designed by Pugin. An armoire made by Crace to Pugin’s design cost the considerable sum of £154 and, like all the objects acquired, was published in an interesting report by the committee explaining their reason for purchase. The cabinet was described as: “Remarkable as a piece of furniture in which the construction has been carefully considered, and the decoration confined to the enrichment of the necessary spaces and framing in the true style of the old work, where all ornament was strictly subordinate to the construction of the article; and the locks, hinges and other metalwork were made ornamental portions of the whole design.”28

A number of the objects shown in the Mediaeval Court were manufactured by new techniques pioneered by Pugin and his manufacturers. For example, Pugin was very knowledgeable about chromolithographic book illustration and in 1848 encouraged two lithographers, F. W. M. Collins and Alfred Reynolds, from Clerkenwell in London, to experiment with the application of lithography to ceramic tiles and tableware.29 The resulting patent for the process was bought by Pugin’s close friend, Herbert Minton, who showed examples in the Mediaeval Court: “The process is likely to come into extensive use, and has been already applied to decoration of pottery in general; tiles thus ornamented have been ordered for the smoking-room of the House of Commons and have been much used for the fireplaces in other parts of the new Palace. Specimens of them were exhibited as forming flower-pots, the gilt iron frames of which were furnished by Messrs. Hardman.”30 Two of these pots were bought for the museum, a small one and a larger one. They perfectly represent the type of manufactured domestic product design thought to be instructive to the students at the Government School of Design. Earlier, in 1844, the school had acquired its first objects, which were similar in character, at the L’Exposition des Produits de l’Industrie de 1844, held in Paris.

Thus the Pugin objects shown in the Mediaeval Court were not only seen and bought by some of the millions of visitors to the exhibition, but they inspired and were copied by manufacturers and designers throughout the world. Those acquired by the new museum went on display in 1852 for the instruction of generations of students at the School of Design and other visitors; they are still on display in the Victoria & Albert Museum today. Pugin died in 1852, and the firms he had encouraged such as Minton’s, Crace’s, and Hardman’s, retained many of his original designs. They were to profit greatly from marketing their Pugin products for much of the rest of the century. In fact, some of these designs, such as wallpapers and tiles, are still in production today.

© Bard Graduate Center, Clive Wainwright.