Nicholas Hawksmoor

English architect

• Born: c. 1661
• Birthplace: Probably East Drayton, Nottinghamshire, England
• Died: March 25, 1736
• Place of death: London, England

Overshadowed by Sir Christopher Wren and Sir John Vanbrugh for two centuries, Hawksmoor became recognized in the twentieth century as one of the three greatest English Baroque architects. His daring originality and eccentric brilliance mark him as the innovator of his time.

Early Life

Nothing is known particularly of the early life of Nicholas Hawksmoor. The family name was, in fact, Hawksmore, and his father, also called Nicholas, was probably a farmer. The family has a history in the northeast corner of Nottinghamshire, but Hawksmoor’s exact age and date of birth are unknown, since the parish records for the years 1659 to 1663 for East Drayton are missing.

He seems to have had some education, and, at the time of his death, it was stated that he was bred as a “scholar” and knew the “modern tongues.” There was a grammar school in the nearby town of Dunham, and he may have been educated there. While still a young boy, he was employed as a clerk by Justice Samuel Mellish at Doncaster, which suggests that he had some education.

At the age of eighteen, he joined the most important architect in London, Sir Christopher Wren. How he got the position is not known, but a professional acquaintance of Wren, Edward Gouge, had done some plaster work for Justice Mellish and may have brought Hawksmoor to Wren’s attention. At any rate, it was the chance of a lifetime, and he was to work with Wren for the next forty years. When Hawksmoor joined him, Wren was at the height of his creative powers; he was serving as surveyor-general in charge of Crown buildings, including the construction of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and he had the ancillary task of supplying parish churches for the city as a result of the loss caused by the Great Fire of London of 1666. Hawksmoor was brought along slowly, starting off with simple office duties, but the late 1680’s found him working as a draftsman, and by the early 1690’s he was preparing designs for Chelsea Hospital and working as Wren’s clerk and draftsman for St. Paul’s and the city churches.

As early as 1685, he was preparing designs for his first important private commission, Easton Nexton House in Northamptonshire, owned by Sir William Fermor. The chance probably came to him through Wren, who was a distant relation of Fermor and was himself uninterested in domestic jobs. In 1689, he was made clerk of works at Wren’s Kensington Palace project and was in charge of the drawing office at St. Paul’s from 1691 onward. These major works went on for years, and he was, for example, clerk of works at Greenwich Hospital (Wren’s last great commission). Just how much he contributed artistically to these works, particularly during Wren’s life, is uncertain, but at Greenwich the King William Block and the Queen Anne Block look stylistically to be his, and the Orangery at Kensington Palace is probably his.

He was married in the 1690’s, to a woman called Hester, and they had one daughter, Elizabeth. In 1699, established as Wren’s closest associate and as an architect of some reputation in his own right, Hawksmoor entered into his second association as a subordinate, this time with the popular playwright Sir John Vanbrugh. It may seem surprising that a man without any technical training should consider himself, as Vanbrugh did, an architect, but it was not uncommon; Wren originally had a career as a scientist before deciding to design buildings. Hawksmoor, trained step-by-step in the intricacies of the profession by Wren, was in a sense better educated as an architect than either of the men whom he seconded. As in his association with Wren, Hawksmoor was to follow, and Vanbrugh was to be the gentleman-designer. Born to a humble farm family, it seemed to be temperamentally sufficient for Hawksmoor to follow the lead set by the gentlemen.

Life’s Work

The two great buildings of the Vanbrugh-Hawksmoor collaboration were Castle Howard in Yorkshire and Blenheim Palace, the gift of the British nation to the duke of Marlborough for his military service during the war against Louis XIV. Castle Howard, which is familiar to many because of its use in the television version of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, is mainly Vanbrugh’s, although Hawksmoor’s Mausoleum, one of the splendid garden buildings, is an example of his later work. Blenheim, on the other hand, seems to have strong Hawksmoor elements in its wall decoration (where Hawksmoor always was more imaginative than either Wren or Vanbrugh) and in its numerous, extravagant towers, not only on the roofline but also on various ornamental structures throughout the park.

Both Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor were ordered off the Blenheim site by the imperious duchess of Marlborough (Sarah Churchill) in 1716, and Vanbrugh, its principal architect, was never to get back. Hawksmoor was brought back in 1722, designing ceilings, finishing rooms, and contributing what is considered the finest interior, the Long Library, as well as Woodstock Gate, the main entrance to the park.

Through these years of collaboration with Wren and Vanbrugh, Hawksmoor was involved in several independent projects, including the building of six churches in the London area that were to be the eventual touchstones of his public reputation.

He tried to work at Oxford but was rarely chosen, although the Old Clarendon Press (1712-1713) is his, and ironically, Radcliffe Camera, designed by a smoother rival, James Gibbs, looks unnervingly like Hawksmoor’s proposal for the same job. Losing commissions to others, who were often less deserving, was an old story for Hawksmoor. In 1702, he lost to Vanbrugh for the job of comptroller of the King’s Works, and as the young architects of Palladian persuasion came in the second decade, he lost his Whitehall positions as clerk and secretary to the Board of Works. He got his secretaryship back in 1725 but failed to succeed to Vanbrugh’s office at the time of his collaborator’s death. There is considerable evidence in Hawksmoor’s correspondence of his unhappiness about the way in which he was treated in the public domain, which was quite as much a matter of politics and influence as it was a matter of capability and prevailing aesthetic taste.

Through the succeeding centuries the reputation of Wren and, to a slightly lesser extent, that of Vanbrugh were to flourish; that of Nicholas Hawksmoor was to slip badly, and he was seen as not much more than an eccentric assistant to the grander talents of the other two men. Eccentric was, in fact, not an inappropriate way to see him. In fact, the Baroque itself is eccentric, an improvisatory manipulation of Renaissance classical ideas that can be viewed as inconsistent with the idea of propriety, which has always been strong in architecture. Baroque, on the Continent, was often saucily excessive, taking classical motifs to their most extravagant length, allowing the curves to swing wildly and the lines of the buildings to affect distended, swelling proportion, as a kind of reaction, in part, to the severity of classical rules, particularly those laid down by the great Italian Palladio.

The Baroque came late to England. There were modest signs of it in the mid-seventeenth century, but Wren was its first great British practitioner, and there is always a sense of rational control in his work. What distinguishes Hawksmoor is not so much his tendency to follow more emotionally the examples of continental Baroque practitioners, but his own, really quite peculiar, imaginative leaps, which make his buildings, both inside and out, so eccentrically original. On occasion, it is not inaccurate to see his work as verging on the weird and fantastic. Eclectic, as all Baroque artists were, he not only would exaggerate certain elements in a design but also would mix modes, so that it is not unusual to see classical, Renaissance, and Gothic bits and pieces brought together with surprising success in his buildings.

The London churches, all begun in the second decade of the eighteenth century and all extant in one form or another (near the end of the twentieth century, four of them were in various forms of interior and exterior scaffolding, indicating the determination to retrieve them) despite long-term neglect, the damage occasioned by World War II bombing, and the unfortunate location of three of them in Stepney, east of the city and subject to urban decay and poverty, are perhaps the best examples of what Sir John Summerson in his book Georgian London (1962) calls the imaginative unreason of Baroque. Many of Wren’s churches are close at hand for comparison, and such comparison clearly indicates that though Hawksmoor was a true and faithful servant when working with Wren, he was, on his own, clearly and excitingly his own man.

Particularly adept at dealing with odd and awkward sites, such as those with which he was faced at St. Mary Woolnoth, and to a slightly lesser extent at St. George, Bloomsbury, and St. Alfege, Greenwich, he was always able to make an aesthetic advantage out of the liabilities. This is particularly true of St. Mary Woolnoth, which is literally crammed onto a pie-shaped site in the narrow streets across from the Bank of England. It possesses a strange, rusticated, fortress-like facade, topped by two low, embryonic towers that give it both a dramatic thuggishness and a sophisticated wittiness in the interplay of the ascending elements of the design. The same wittiness is applied to the problem of the sides, particularly to the north, where the street is so narrow, so angled that windows would be irrelevant and which Hawksmoor decorated with three deep niches in which finely carved concave aediculae are placed.

Nothing about the powerful, squat exterior of Woolnoth is sufficient preparation for the surprise of the squared richness of its archetypally Baroque interior. Indeed, surprise is a constant in his churches, particularly in design of the steeples, which range from a copy of the stepped, pyramidal Tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus at St. George, Bloomsbury, through the daring, sharp-angled, almost parodic steeples at St. Anne, Limehouse, and St. George-in-the-East.

Dismissed as vulgarly out of style by the new Palladians he may have been, but Hawksmoor often used Palladian motifs, particularly variations on the rounded Venetian windows, with arrogant virtuosity. Christ Church, Spitalfields, uses the arched window at both ends of the building: to the east, most conservatively as window, but at the west end on a much larger scale, as portico, which he repeats in the belfry story. At St. Alfege, Greenwich, it reaches even larger proportion as a portico, which is unusually placed, not at the west end, but abutting on the eastern chancel, since the main road passes along the eastern end of the site.

Hawksmoor was always particularly sensitive to the decorative, sculptural potential of exterior walls. Windows and window surrounds are fair game for all sorts of play, particularly in the use of oversized, almost Brobdingnagian keystones, for which he had a peculiar penchant. If he hated the Palladians, pushing into power and proclaiming their determination to purify architecture, it was not because he did not know what the rules were or could not use them. His misuse of motifs, of any and every kind, was always deliberate, always calculated to remind, to resonate with echoes of their proper use. On the other hand, Woodstock Gate is as fine an example of the true triumphal arch as anything ever produced in the original glory of the Roman Empire.

The Woodstock Gate is helpful in coming to an understanding of Hawksmoor’s aesthetic imagination. If Hawksmoor is often the most extravagantly moving of the English Baroque architects, he is not to be taken, therefore, as most inclined to follow European influences. He is, in fact, much the solidest, dourest, most monumentally inclined of the English group. The very weight of the Woodstock Gate, its obvious celebration of classical sources, is always present in his work. Whatever mix he may make of classical, Gothic, and Renaissance sources always has an unmistakable English stolidity about it. Fantastic he may be, but never frivolous. Wren is more graceful, Vanbrugh is more playful, and both are more grandiose than Hawksmoor.

Perhaps his working-class background held Hawksmoor to the ground; for all of his flights of wild surprise, there is always a sense in his buildings of sturdy craftsmanship. The weight, however, is never of such a nature as to diminish the unexpectedness of his buildings inside or out. Despite their Baroque sonority, there is often a graceful élan about the buildings that is at its best at St. George-in-the-East, which seems to ride, as Alastair Service puts it, like a great ship alongside the slightly sunken road on its south side. If one mark of the great artist is an immediately recognizable style that never palls, Hawksmoor had such a gift. What he also possessed was the capacity to be enchantingly different from work to work, and the London churches best exemplify this gift for “making it new” over and over again. With an eye fixed on the belfry stage of the monumentally towering portico and spire at the west end of Christ Church, Spitalfields, one can step slightly to the side and watch solidity turn into the flat of a stage set, architecture being quicker than the eye.

In the 1730’s matters did not much improve for him, but he did gain the commission for the important design of the West Towers of Westminster Abbey, which were completed after his death. He died in March, 1736, and was buried, as he requested, at the village of Shenley in the county of Hertford.

Significance

The drama of the Hawksmoor churches has not stopped working. It has, rather surprisingly, flowed into literature: It is St. Mary Woolnoth of which T. S. Eliot speaks in “The Burial of the Dead” section in The Waste Land (1922). Even more intriguing is the use that Peter Ackroyd makes of the London churches in his novel Hawksmoor (1985), in which all the London sites and buildings are used in a bizarre mystery of eighteenth and twentieth century murders, connected directly to the churches.

Some architectural historians have protested these literary depictions, primarily because what is known of Nicholas Hawksmoor suggests that he was a gentle, modest, uncomplicated man. On the other hand, his buildings are not, and there is something appropriate about them appearing in a modern gothic novel, a form of literature that developed in the later eighteenth century and that Hawksmoor’s churches anticipated as not improper settings for the grotesqueries of that literary form.

Bibliography

Downes, Kerry. Hawksmoor. New York: Praeger, 1970. The best popular critical biography by the scholar most responsible for putting what little is known of Hawksmoor in order. Generously illustrated.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Hawksmoor. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980. A fuller, more scholarly study. Contains many illustrations. Despite its scholarship, it is gracefully written and highly readable.

DuPrey, Pierre de la Ruffinière. Hawksmoor’s London Churches: Architecture and Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Examines Hawksmoor’s six extant London churches, describing how their design reflects Hawksmoor’s desire to connect with a pure Christianity.

Fletcher, Sir Banister. A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method. London: B. T. Batsford, 1954. This book, which is widely available in reference libraries, takes the mystery out of the movements, bringing the entire history of the scientific art to one book with many helpful illustrations.

Goodhart-Rendel, Harry Stuart. Nicholas Hawksmoor. London: E. Benn, 1924. The first breakthrough text that began the movement toward retrieving a reputation that had for centuries been ignored. Quite short, impassioned, and determined to put Hawksmoor in his proper place.

Hart, Vaughan. Nicholas Hawksmoor: Rebuilding Ancient Wonders. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. Hart, an architectural historian, explains Hawksmoor’s architectural theory and his role in the development of English architecture. Published for the Paul Mellen Centre for Studies in British Art.

Little, Bryan. English Historic Architecture. New York: Hastings House, 1964. A survey in some detail of the history of British architecture from the Saxon period to 1914, putting the English Baroque movement into the context needed to understand why it was not quite the same thing as the continental Baroque movement. Well-chosen illustrations.

Service, Alastair. The Architects of London. London: Architectural Press, 1979. This volume can be lugged about on a tour of London. It begins its survey in 1066 and ends with late-twentieth century architects. Includes sections on Hawksmoor, Wren, and Vanbrugh, setting out the important buildings and their locations. The comments are concise and sensible, and are often apt and incisive.

Summerson, John. Georgian London. London: Penguin Books, 1962. London in the eighteenth century flourished under the tasteful determination of a society, flush with money, that wanted to make the perfect town. Summerson’s work is the best study of that adventure in social aesthetics, and he puts the English Baroque movement in its city context.

White, Roger. Nicholas Hawksmoor and the Replanning of Oxford. Oxford, England: Oxford University, Ashmolean Museum, 1997. Describes Hawksmoor’s vision for rebuilding Oxford, with drawings and schematics of the architect’s plan to remodel six colleges.