Nicholas Hawksmoor (probably
1661 - 25 March 1736) was a British architect born to a humble family in Nottinghamshire
.
His career
formed the brilliant middle link in Britain's
trio of great baroque
architects. Hawksmoor was
characterised by
Howard Colvin as
"more assured in his command of the classical vocabulary than the
untrained
Vanbrugh, more imaginative
in his vision than the intellectual
Wren."
From about 1684 to about 1700 Hawksmoor
worked with his teacher, Christopher
Wren, on projects including Chelsea Hospital
, St. Paul's Cathedral
, Hampton Court Palace
and Greenwich Hospital.
Thanks to
Wren's influence as Surveyor-General, the modest and diffident
Hawksmoor was named Clerk of the Works at Kensington
Palace
(1689) and Deputy Surveyor of Works at Greenwich
(1705). In 1718, when Wren was superseded by
the new, amateur Surveyor,
William
Benson, Hawksmoor was deprived of his double post to provide
places for Benson's brother, a bitter blow. "Poor Hawksmoor," wrote
Vanbrugh in 1721. "What a Barbarous Age... What wou'd Monsr.
Colbert in France have given
for such a man?"
He then
worked for a time with Sir John Vanbrugh, helping him build
Blenheim
Palace
for John Churchill, 1st Duke
of Marlborough, where he took charge after Vanbrugh's final
break with the demanding Duchess of Marlborough, and Castle Howard
for Charles Howard, later the 3rd Earl of
Carlisle. There is no doubt that Hawksmoor brought to the
brilliant amateur the professional grounding he had received from
Wren, and in Colvin's words, "enabled Vanbrugh's heroic designs to
be translated into actuality."
In 1702,
Hawksmoor designed the baroque country house of Easton Neston
in Northamptonshire
for Sir William Fermor. This is the only
country house for which he was the
sole architect, though he extensively remodelled Ockham House for
the Lord Chief Justice King (now mostly destroyed). Perhaps
fortunately, Easton Neston was not completed as he intended, for
the symmetrical unexecuted flanking wings and entrance colonnade
were very much in the style of
John
Vanbrugh; whereas the house as it stands is pure innovative
Hawksmoor at his finest.
The West Towers, Westminster Abbey
Hawksmoor
conceived grand rebuilding schemes for central Oxford
, most of
which were not realised. The idea was for a round library for the
Radcliffe
Camera
but that commission went to James Gibbs.
He did
design the Clarendon
Building
at Oxford; the
Codrington Library and new buildings at All Souls
College, Oxford
; parts of Worcester College, Oxford
with Sir George
Clarke; the High Street screen at The Queen's
College, Oxford
and six new churches in London. Although he did not
live to see them built, Hawksmoor also designed the West Towers of
Westminster
Abbey
. In addition, he superimposed on the
medieval portal, and became Surveyor of the Abbey when Wren died in
1723.
Unlike
many of his wealthier contemporaries, Hawksmoor never travelled to
Italy
on a Grand Tour, where he
might have been influenced by the style of architecture there. His ideas seem to
derive from engravings, especially monuments of ancient Rome
and
reconstructions of the Temple of Solomon
. But he was versatile in his work, and all
the buildings he designed are distinctly different from each other.
The influence of Italian
Baroque architect
Borromini can be detected in some.
Hawksmoor's six London churches
These churches were built in accordance with a
Parliamentary Act of
1711 providing tax money for the building of fifty new London
churches, only a dozen of which were actually built, six of them to
Hawksmoor's design.
He also designed towers for two more,
designed by others: St John Horsleydown and St Luke Old
Street
. The six churches wholly designed by
Hawksmoor are his best-known independent works of architecture.
They compare in their complexity of interpenetrating internal
spaces with contemporaneous work in Italy by
Francesco Borromini. Their spires,
essentially Gothic outlines executed in innovative and imaginative
Classical detail, dominated the London skyline as a counterpoint to
St. Paul's dome deep into the 20th century.
Hawksmoor in recent literature
Hawksmoor's architecture has influenced several poets and authors
of the twentieth century.
His church St Mary Woolnoth
is mentioned in T. S. Eliot's poem
The Waste
Land (1922).
Algernon Stitch lived in a "superb creation by Nicholas Hawksmoor"
in London in the novel
Scoop by
Evelyn Waugh (1938).
Hawksmoor is the subject of a poem by
Iain
Sinclair called 'Nicholas Hawksmoor: His Churches' which
appeared in Sinclair's collection of poems
Lud Heat
(1975). Sinclair argued that Hawksmoor's churches formed a pattern
consistent with the forms of
Theistic
Satanism.
This idea was developed by
Peter
Ackroyd in his novel
Hawksmoor (1985). In this, the
historical Hawksmoor is refigured as the fictional Devil-worshiper
Nicholas Dyer, while the eponymous Hawksmoor is cast as a
twentieth-century detective charged with investigating a series of
murders perpertrated on Dyer's (Hawksmoor's) churches. The novel is
arguably a good example of
magic
realism.
Both Sinclair and Ackroyd's ideas in turn were further developed by
Alan Moore and
Eddie Campbell in their
graphic novel,
From
Hell, which speculated that
Jack the Ripper used Hawksmoor's buildings
as part of
ritual magic, with his
victims as
human sacrifice. In the
appendix, Moore revealed that he had met and spoke with Sinclair on
numerous occasions while developing the core ideas of the book. The
authors also brought notoriety to Hawksmoor's famous London
churches. The argument includes the idea that, when dotted up on a
map, the churches produce an
Eye of
Horus, and that this has some ritual significance.
In 2002 Hawksmoor was the subject of an award-winning monograph by
the architectural historian
Vaughan
Hart, which redefined Hawksmoor with new insights and
discoveries.There is a school named after him called Nicholas
Hawksmoor Primary School in Towcester Northamptonshire with over
500 pupils.
Hawksmoor is mentioned in "The History Boys" by Alan Bennett, p82,
where Akthar is questioned by Mrs Lintott about his interest in
architecture.
Memorials
References
- Colvin, Howard, Biographical
Dictionary of British Architects 1600–1840, 3rd ed.
- Downes, Kerry, Nicholas Hawksmoor
- De la Ruffiniere du Prey, Pierre. Hawksmoor's London
Churches: Architecture and Theology. London and Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000.
- Vaughan Hart, Nicholas
Hawksmoor: Rebuilding Ancient Wonders (2002)
See also
External links
, Wapping
, Northamptonshire
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