CHAPTER VI - Art and architecture

Summary

It is the fault of most writing on the history of art in the nineteenth century that art and architecture are kept separate. Admittedly, it is not easy to see a unity of style between Scott's St Pancras of 1868 and Monet's St Lazare of 1877. Moreover, one is discouraged from any efforts at formulating such a unity by the crashing drop in aesthetic quality directly one moves from the most familiar works of painting to the most familiar works of architecture. No one can deny the truth of this value judgement, but there is also a fallacy involved. One tends to forget official painting and non-official architecture, the one as bad as any insurance company headquarters, the other not as good, but occasionally nearly as good, as Monet and Seurat. If one is aware of the whole evidence, a treatment can be attempted doing justice to all its aspects. The only difficulty which remains is that the layman—and in this respect nearly everybody is a layman—knows much about the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, but near to nothing about Philip Webb and Norman Shaw, H. H. Richardson and Stanford White, and indeed Antoni Gaudí.

This is one reason why painting is taken first in this chapter. Another is that the nineteenth century was indeed a century of the dominance of painting, aesthetically as well as socially. The dominance had been established before the year 1870. Socially speaking the patron of 1870 was no longer the patron of 1770. About 1770 the social situation of art had still been that of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Baroque.