Downes: Hawksmoor Book

After two decades, this remains the standard work on Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661-1736), a student and collaborator of Christopher Wren and John Vanbrugh and one of Britain's outstanding baroque architects. The book covers all of Hawksmoor's surviving buildings—six London churches, All Souls and the Clarendon Building in Oxford, the towers of Westminster Abbey, parts of Castle Howard (including his strange, melancholic, blind Mausoleum) and Blenheim, Greenwich Hospital, and the strikingly beautiful house at Easton Neston. The large number of extant drawings and documents illuminate not only the evolution of many of these works but also Hawksmoor's artistic aims and personality, as well as his relation to Wren, Vanbrugh, and his rivals the Palladians. First published in the late 1950s, this was the first major study of Hawksmoor, untangling his work from that of his masters and rescuing him from the shadows of the 18th-century classicists and the Victorians who despised his work and considered his baroque style immoral. In this new edition, many details have been revised in light of recent research, and the list of buildings and drawings has been brought up to date. There are eight appendixes containing Hawksmoor's letters, discussions and explanations of plans and buildings, an extensive list of his buildings and drawings, a bibliographic note and index.Read More