The architectural pattern books of Elizabeth Macquarie
This article first appeared in the summer 2009–10 edition of Insites magazine
The architectural pattern books of Elizabeth Macquarie
Written by Megan Martin, former head of Collections & Access, and Dr Scott Hill, Curator, Museums of History NSW
Most students of Australian history attribute the architectural achievements of Governor Macquarie’s era to Macquarie’s architect Francis Greenway. Yet when Commissioner Bigge presented the third of his reports on the state of the colony of NSW to the British Parliament in July 1823 he recommended that the position of colonial architect be discontinued and the responsibility for public works given to an officer of the Royal Engineers. Bigge acknowledged that Greenway’s architectural skill had been ‘the means of introducing into the buildings of the colony greater celerity and better taste than had previously prevailed’ but considered that some buildings had been ‘finished in a style of ornament and decoration little suited to the limited means of so young a colony as New South Wales, and very much disproportioned to the natural progress of its population’.1
While alluding to the difficulties of Greenway’s character, Bigge also suggested that Greenway could not be blamed for the unnecessarily ornamental style that characterised many public works, and in doing so alluded to the role that both Governor and Mrs Macquarie had played in shaping the public architecture of the colony. The evidence collected by Bigge during the course of his inquiry includes a number of direct references to Elizabeth Macquarie’s involvement in matters architectural. The Reverend Samuel Marsden, for example, told Bigge that Mrs Macquarie had explained that the plan for the Parramatta Orphan School was ‘drawn upon the plan of a gentleman’s house in Scotland’.2 Greenway himself reported that a house in Macquarie Place for the Governor’s Secretary, built before Greenway’s appointment as Acting Civil Architect in March 1815, came from ‘a book of cottage architecture’ owned by Mrs Macquarie.3
The book in question was Edward Gyfford’s Designs for elegant cottages and small villas, published in London in 1806, and there is some evidence that Mrs Macquarie also owned Gyfford’s Designs for small picturesque cottages and hunting boxes, published in 1807. These may have been the only architectural pattern books in the colony in 1810. Before the Macquaries’ arrival the sources for local building design relied on a combination of experience and good fortune. Military engineers and some officers brought with them building and design skills partially acquired in India and other colonial territories. The convict population meanwhile possessed their own range of skills, from brickmaking to carpentry, with a wide range of vernacular traditions.
Gyfford’s first book probably provided the source for an intended rebuilding of Government House and was certainly the inspiration for a new house for one of Macquarie’s civil servants, the Judge Advocate. Although the spectacular mismanagement of the construction of this house from 1812 to 1814 made it a very expensive building, the design itself was not especially opulent. Gyfford described it in the pattern book as ‘calculated for the convenience of persons of moderate income’.
The use of Gyfford introduced a layer of architectural politeness into early colonial Sydney. However, the relative modesty of his designs contrasts greatly with the pattern books employed at the end of the Macquarie period by one of Macquarie’s greatest critics, pastoralist John Macarthur. Macarthur’s was a more consciously sophisticated, metropolitan taste acquired in London during his years of exile and fed after his return to the colony by views and designs supplied by his son Edward. In 1820 he commissioned plans for an imposing Greek Revival villa for either his Pyrmont or Camden estates from a young London-trained architect named Henry Kitchen. Kitchen’s unusually extensive professional library included at least one volume of villa designs by renowned architect Sir John Soane, as well as a volume of Stuart & Revett’s textbook of Greek architectural detail, The antiquities of Athens.4
Architectural historian James Broadbent argues that Kitchen’s Grecian mansion for Macarthur was ‘designed to rise sublimely above the scrub on Pyrmont Point as the focus of the westward view from the town’ and was probably in ‘deliberate contrast to the frippery of Macquarie’s (and Greenway’s) forts and stables [notably Fort Macquarie and the New Government House stables, both 1817–21] … serious, utterly Greek and uncompromisingly modern, a monument to Macarthur’s wealth and power and Kitchen’s own informed taste and superior talent’.
Although the Macquaries’ influence on the architectural character of houses in the colony ended with their departure in February 1822, Broadbent has suggested that Elizabeth Macquarie’s pattern books may have passed into the possession of Greenway, judging by the evidence of the house built in the late 1820s for Robert Campbell in Bligh Street, Sydney. Plans and photographs of this house show a strong similarity to the design in Gyfford’s first book.
Thereafter Gyfford disappears. By that time a new generation of architects, including Ambrose Hallen and John Verge, were arriving in Sydney, and new pattern books by writers such as David Lang, Peter Nicholson, John Plaw, John Papworth and the prolific John Claudius Loudon were circulating among the rising class of merchants, landowners and civil servants anxious to demonstrate their claims to gentility against the prevailing vernacular of convict society.
Notes
1. J T Bigge, Report of the Commissioner of Inquiry on the state of agriculture and trade in the colony of New South Wales, London, 1823, pp102–3.
2. Bonwick transcripts, Box 20, p3481, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.
3. Bonwick transcripts, Box 1, p383, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.
4. The similarity of the portico in Kitchen’s villa design to that of the ‘Doric Portico in Athens’ published in volume 1 of the Antiquities suggests that this was the volume he owned.
5. James Broadbent, The Australian colonial house, Hordern House, Sydney, 1997, p116. See also Scott Hill, Paper Houses: John Macarthur and the 30 year design process of Camden Park, PhD thesis, The University of Sydney, 2015, pp154–203.
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