Neoclassicism in Britain: the Adam brothers and 'Athenian Stuart'

Neoclassicism in Britain:
the Adam brothers and ‘Athenian Stuart’

Ralph Harrington
BA (Lond.), MSt (Oxon.), DPhil (Oxon.)

copyright notice | citation information | plagiarism | notes

THE MID-EIGHTEENTH CENTURY was a period of flux and change for British architecture. From the early years of the century, Palladianism had been dominant, extolled as the perfect, universal architectural style; but the years from 1740 to 1760, a period of instability in politics, aesthetics, and ideas, also saw dynamic change and experimentation in architecture. The ‘static regularity and perfection’ which had underlain the arts of the Augustan age began to produce in reaction ‘a renascence of imagination and perceptiveness stimulating natural philosophy and romanticism’.[1] This was an age when Britain was open to new architectural influences from a wide variety of sources; interior decoration and ornament came infected with the spirit of the continental rococo, and enthusiasm for exotic and revived antique styles – Chinese, Gothic, Tudor – underlined the accepted standards of classicism with a new spirit of eclecticism and experiment. It was against this background that James ‘Athenian’ Stuart (1713-1788) and the Adam brothers, most prominently Robert Adam (1728-1792), developed their interpretations of classical architecture and decoration.

The degree of success achieved by Adam and Stuart in disseminating their particular styles during their careers differed greatly. Adam was productive, fashionable and influential, while Stuart’s productiveness was very limited and he remained a comparatively minor figure in contemporary architecture: ‘as an architect, Stuart failed to make the most of his opportunities ... The success of the brothers Adam in popularising their architectural innovations is the measure of [Stuart’s] failure to do the same’.[2] As will be discussed below, the sharply different characters of Stuart and Adam were of considerable importance in shaping their respective careers; but the nature of the styles of architecture each expounded, and the relationships of those styles to the contemporary background, were also vital factors.

For both James Stuart and Robert Adam, the investigation of surviving ancient architecture was the foundation of their work. Stuart became involved in a scheme to survey and record the surviving monuments of ancient Greece after meeting Nicholas Revett and other English travellers in Italy, and becoming associated with the Society of Dilettante. A proposal describing the project was issued in 1748, and Stuart travelled with Revett to Greece in 1751 to begin the survey, returning to England in 1755. Robert Adam, is about the same time, was in Italy on his grand tour; in 1757 he surveyed the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Split in Dalmatia, returning to London in 1758. The discoveries of contemporary archaeology were an influence of increasing importance on the architecture of the period; and both James Stuart and Robert Adam, with a store of new ideas based on the surviving architecture of the ancient world at a time when new ideas were in demand, had the potential to exert considerable influence on the architectural taste of their age.

The Adam style, as it developed over the course of the late eighteenth century, made sophisticated use of motifs and patterns from a wide range of sources, combining the fruits of recent archaeological investigations with decoration from renaissance, baroque and contemporary styles. The discovery, particularly at Pompeii and Herculaneum, of the circumstances of ancient Roman domestic architecture, decoration and artefacts was of particular importance to the Adams in creating a complex and highly adaptable scheme of integrated interior decoration and furniture design of a specifically domestic classical character. The Adams were severely criticised by some, notably Horace Walpole, for their ‘gingerbread and snippets of emroidery’ and ‘filigrane toy work’, but the success of their style was widespread and immediate.

James Stuart’s work proceeded at an altogether slower pace. The proposal for their publication of The Antiquties of Athens had initially raised a great deal of interest, but the schedule for the project had been over optimistic, and the ultimate realisation of the scheme failed to fulfil expectations, blunting the impact of Stuart’s ideas. The length of time the work to appear reduced interest: volume I did not appear until 1762, seven years after the authors’ return to London, and in failing to cover any of the great monuments of Athens, being restricted instead to minor buildings, gravely disappointed many subscribers. Subsequent volumes were even slower in appearing; volume II, which did include the Parthenon, was not published until 1789, while volumes III to V were not finally all available until 1830, forty-two years after Stuart’s death. Furthermore, the subscribers to the Antiquities were gentlemen, patrons and collectors rather than builders, decorators and architects. Whereas the Adam style became ‘the common property of a London builder’,[3] the impact of Stuart’s work on the architectural and building trades was limited and indirect.

However, there was no doubting the novelty and importance of Stuart’s work, which, in laying the foundations for the Greek Revival, broke the domination of the Roman architectural idea in Britain and brought British architectural thinking gradually into contact with the same sphere of neoclassical inspiration as much important work on the continent. In France, the discovery of ancient Greece was an established part of the neoclassical ideal; Laugier wrote in 1753 that ‘architecture owes all that is perfect in it to the Greeks’, and that the Romans were capable merely of ‘admiring, and ... copying the most excellent models that the Greeks helped them to’.[4] In Britain, this was a new and controversial idea when echoed nine years later by Stuart and Revett in the preface to the Antiquities of Athens:

... as Greece was the great Mistress of the Arts, and Rome, in this respect, no more than her disciple, it may be presumed, for the most admired Buildings which adorned that Imperial City were but imitations of Grecian originals ... It seemed therefore evident that Greece is ... where the purest and most elegant examples of ancient Architecture are to be discovered.[5]

This bold claim for the superiority of Greece over Rome places Stuart’s work in a purer, clearer stream of neoclassicism than the Adam brothers’ sophisticated synthesis of Rome, the Levant and the renaissance; but Stuart and the Adams are akin in their nascent romanticism. Rather than echoing the intellectual, rational new classicism of France, new classicism in Britain became associated with ideas of the sublime and the picturesque. This spirit can be seen in Robert Adam’s concern to infuse his work with a sense of ‘movement’, and, more strongly and significantly, in Stuart’s few surviving buildings; his garden structures of the 1750s at Hagley and Shugborough show great sensitivity to their landscape settings, the ‘Shepherd’s Monument’ at Shugborough being a superb representative of eighteenth-century romantic primitivism.

Robert Adam had been sufficiently aware of the potential of Stuart’s work to delay the publication of his own Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro, but when it did appear its direct effect on architecture was the more considerable because Adam had already established his architectural practice. The Adams were determined to succeed in the newly professional business of architecture, and used their study of Diocletian’s palace and the later Works of Robert and James Adam as manifestos and advertisements for their work in way in which Stuart signally failed to exploit The Antiquties of Athens. James and William Adam played vital roles in the Adam architectural practice, but it was dominated by Robert’s ‘brilliance as a designer and his enormous capacity for work’.[6] The Adams made extensive use of employed and subcontracted labour for drafting and craft work, and used mass production and standardisation in the production of articles such as doorknobs, fire grates and balustrades; they actively cultivated new clients, disseminated their ideas and achievements through their publications, and assiduously attacked their competitors, including Stuart himself.

Stuart, conversely, showed no particular interest in making a successful business of his architectural discoveries and ideas. He worked alone, never establishing an office on the modern Adam model, taking little trouble to advertise himself or to seek out work – he received such work as he undertook mainly through friends in the Society of Dilettanti. The results of this difference in attitude between the Adam brothers and Stuart are readily apparent in their respective productivity: the list of Adam’s works in Colvin’s Dictionary of British Architects 1600-1840 covers six pages, while the equivalent list for Stuart, admittedly summarising a shorter career, takes up just over one page.

Personality differences were clearly important in this. The Adams, and Robert Adam in particular, were all efficient, hard-working, and apparently single-minded in a devotion to the architectural profession. Stuart, however, was indolent, unreliable, unconcerned about making money or being successful: for the majority of his working life ‘his commissions were random, his life one of cheerful indolence, and his works often completed by other hands’.[7] In short, Adam was active and energetic in promoting his style; Stuart was passive and uncommitted in making anything of his.

There was more to the limited impact of Stuart’s Greek style during the eighteenth century than the architect’s own failings, however. The underlying spirit of much British architecture throughout the century, despite the innovations and experiments referred to above, remained rooted in Palladian classicism; Palladianism provided the standard against which other styles were judged. Furthermore, the great age of building was over by mid-century, limiting scope for the use of new styles to interior decoration, small projects such as garden structures, and alterations to existing buildings. The Adam style, decorative, eclectic, adaptable, and basically an interior style, would work successfully within these limitations; and, although highly individual – ‘everything the Adams touched they made completely their own’[8] – it could be imitated and applied by other architects. The Greek style which Stuart employed was less amenable to compromise or adaptation; in presenting a more thoroughgoing challenge to traditional classicism and to the Roman-derived British new classicism in the later eighteenth century, it remained harder to absorb into the contemporary stylistic canon. Thus, while the Adam style was widely accepted, applied and imitated, Stuart’s Greek style remained just one of a number of novel architectural styles competing for attention.

Which of the two architects was more truly ‘neoclassical’ remains something of an open question. It can be argued that Stuart was in fact the more clearly neoclassical architect, firmly in an English tradition of classicism stretching back to the early seventeenth century, linking the architecture of Inigo Jones with that of the age of the picturesque. Stuart remained faithful to the Greek style which he had sought out and recorded; while Adam’s style was a compromise, a ‘synthesis of his own creation’.[9] This was in large measure the key to Adam’s success, for he accurately interpreted the desires of his clientele in an age of aesthetic flux for a style which was itself a compromise. Both the Adam style and Stuart’s publications ‘came at precisely the right moment for those who were jaded with Palladianism and had begun to learn that Rome itself must not be considered the paragon of classical perfection’.[10]

There can be no doubt that Stuart failed to fulfil expectations during his lifetime, and today he is seen as very much a minor figure. During the first half of the nineteenth century, however, estimation of ‘Athenian’ Stuart was much higher; Joseph Gwilt, in his influential Encyclopedia of Architecture (1842), saw Stuart’s influence as beneficial in returning classical architecture to its pure sources in the civilization of Greece and reversing the trend towards the degenerate styles of Imperial Rome. Gwilt praised ‘the chasteness and purity’ of Stuart’s style which had ’had to contend against the opposite and vicious taste of Robert Adam, a fashionable architect whose eye been ruined by the corruption of the worst period of Roman art’.[11] As late as 1854, Owen Jones could claim that Stuart and Revett had ‘generated a mania for Greek architecture, from which we are barely yet recovered’.[12] Seen from the first half of the nineteenth century, a period which had been dominated by the Greek Revival, Stuart’s work took on more significance; his continuing importance throughout this period can be judged from the fact that new editions of The Antiquities of Athens were published in 1825, 1837, 1841, 1849 and 1858. A modern scholar has echoed these nineteenth-century views by writing of Stuart that ‘it was he, more than anyone else, who opened men’s eyes to the dignity and merit of Greek architecture’.[13] It was Stuart rather than Adam who breathed fresh life and vigour into classicism, giving the Greek style an energy which was to sustain it into the 1860s. Considered in a longer perspective his role in laying the foundations of the Greek revival gives his work more long-term significance than the transiently fashionable designs of Robert Adam.

© Ralph Harrington 2005. This work is protected by copyright and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works 3.0 Licence. This means that you can copy, distribute and transmit this work freely as long as it is attributed to the original author; you may not alter, transform or build upon this work; and you may not use this work for commercial purposes.

Citation information for this essay
Please note that proper attribution is required by the licence conditions pertaining to this work, as well as being good scholarly practice.
Cite as: Ralph Harrington, ‘Neoclassicism in Britain: the Adam brothers and “Athenian Stuart”’ (2005)
Location (stable URL): http://www.greycat.org/papers/neoclass.html

A note on plagiarism
Whatever you do with this essay, do it as far as possible in your words, not in mine, and where you do use my words, acknowledge them as mine. Not to do so is to risk committing plagiarism.

Contact the author.

Notes

1. Christopher Hussey, English Country Houses: Early Georgian, 1715-1760 (London: Country Life, 1955; rev. edn. 1965), p. 26.

2. Howard Colvin, Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600-1840 (London: John Murray, 1978), p. 795.

3. Howard Colvin, Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600-1840 (London: John Murray, 1978), p. 47.

4. M.-A. Laugier, Essai sur l’Architecture (1753), quoted in Simon Eliot & Beverley Stern, The Age of Enlightenment (2 vols., London: Ward Lock / Open University Press, 1979), vol. I, p. 12.

5. James Stuart & Nicholas Revett, The Antiquities of Athens, vol. I, preface; quoted in Simon Eliot & Beverley Stern, The Age of Enlightenment (2 vols., London: Ward Lock / Open University Press, 1979), vol. I, pp. 40-1.

6. Howard Colvin, Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600-1840 (London: John Murray, 1978), p. 47.

7. David Watkin, Athenian Stuart (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982), p. 13.

8. John Summerson, The Architecture of the Eighteenth Century (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969), p. 263.

9. J. Mordaunt Crook, The Greek Revival (London: John Murray, 1972), p. 72.

10. Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 314.

11. Joseph Gwilt, Encyclopedia of Architecture (1842), quoted in A. T. Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam (2 vols., London: Country Life, 1922, repr. 1984), vol. I, p. 112.

12. Quoted in Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 11.

13. David Watkin, Athenian Stuart (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982), p. 13.