# Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Shaw, Richard Norman

​SHAW, RICHARD NORMAN (1831–1912), architect, was born in Edinburgh 7 May 1831, the youngest son of William Shaw, by his wife, Elizabeth Brown. His mother was Scotch; the father, who died before he was two years old, came from county Meath, of Protestant Irish stock with a Huguenot strain. The boy went to school at the Hill Street Academy, Edinburgh, and afterwards for a year at Newcastle; but his education was chiefly imparted by his elder sister. At fifteen years old, when he went with the family to London, his bent for architecture was recognized. He was apprenticed to a small architect; and shortly after passed into the office of William Burn [q.v.] in Piccadilly. He was there for seven years, at a time when Burn, in the full tide of practice, was designing ‘mansions’ for territorial magnates in all parts of Great Britain and Ireland. Norman Shaw in this pupilage was well schooled in the art of planning country-houses, and acquired that clean, clear draughtsmanship, by which he won the silver medal of the Royal Academy in 1852, and the gold medal for design in 1853. Next year he was given the travelling studentship of the Academy, and during his year and a half of travel visited Rome, Prague, and Lübeck, as well as the French cathedrals.
At that time, thanks to the enthusiasm of George Edmund Street [q.v.] and William Burges [q.v.], the Gothic of the thirteenth century in France had become the gospel of English art. Viollet le Duc's Dictionnaire de l'Architecture had just been published, and for Shaw remained the classic of Gothic construction; William Butterfield [q.v.] never ceased to be his ideal of the church architect. Indeed, like Burges, Shaw proved his faith by designing furniture after French mediaeval models. The immediate fruit, however, of his travelling year was the publication in 1858 of Architectural Sketches from the Continent—lithograph illustrations drawn by himself from his sketches of French churches. In 1859 he entered the office of G. E. Street, succeeding Philip Webb [q.v.] as chief assistant. Yet this strict school of mediaeval ritual equipped neither Webb nor Shaw as orthodox stylists. What both gained was the conscience of the building artist—the personal sense of aesthetic creation which was to be as clear in Shaw's ‘Gothic’ churches as in his so-called ‘free classic’.
In 1862 Shaw started practice in Argyll Street, Regent Street, with William Eden Nesfield [q.v.], who had been a fellow-student in Burn's office, and for a time his companion in France. Formal partnership did not last, but the two occupied the same office till 1876, and these fourteen years brought Shaw to the front of his profession. In 1868 he designed James Knight's bank at Farnham; and other early clients were the shipowners, Shaw, Savill & Co., his brother's company, for whom in 1871 he designed New Zealand Chambers in Leadenhall Street; the street elevation of this, with its projecting bays and Jacobean glazings, was an evident protest against humdrum city classicalities; still more was it a challenge to the mediaeval stylists. About the same time John Callcott Horsley, R.A. [q.v.], began to give Shaw work, and soon he had many commissions from members of the Royal Academy. Elected an associate in 1872, he became full academician in 1877. For a short time he had been a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects, but he never became a fellow. His attitude towards the Institute is explained in Architecture, a Profession or an Art? (1891), of which he was joint-editor with (Sir) T. G. Jackson.
Building for artists, Shaw was in the swim of that golden age of the Victorian painter, when, after a year or two of Academy recognition, the artist got a competency and built himself a palace-studio in the developing suburbs of Kensington or South Hampstead. In this ‘artist’ building Shaw was the ​protagonist of an architectural evolution. The red-brick walls and tiled roofs, the white sash-barred windows, the inglenooks and bay-recesses of studio-houses, gave a new sense of building to dwellers in square, blank-windowed rooms and monotonous, drab streets. The style was called ‘Queen Anne’; but in Shaw's work it was not a revival of the eighteenth century so much as a recovery of the building art. There has followed the bathos of commercial exploitation; but the suburban inanities are not to be laid at the door of the pioneer architects, Philip Webb, John James Stevenson [q.v.], Nesfield, or Shaw. Lowther Lodge, for example, built by Shaw in 1874 (now the home of the Royal Geographical Society) is the English maison—the town-house, standing in its own grounds, and having style in the practical sense of its needs. Shaw's country-houses possessed the essential merit of being built to requirement and site—whether in the gable and chimney ‘picturesque’ of half-timber and turret, as at Leys Wood, Sussex (1868), Preen Manor, Shropshire (1871), and Cragside, Northumberland (1872); or in the broader stone-work and squarer blocking of Adcote, Shropshire (1876–1881), and Dawpool, Cheshire (1883). In these country-houses the ‘hall’ became the great room as distinctly as Shaw had given that office to the ‘studio’ for his artist clients.
In 1867 Shaw married Agnes Haswell Wood, and in 1876 with their family of three children they moved from St. John's Wood to Ellerdale Road, Hampstead. At the same time he took new offices at 29 Bloomsbury Square, a house now pulled down. His health, which gave way in 1877, much improved in 1881, after a visit to Aix-les-Bains. The next fifteen years were those of his second architectural manner, preluded indeed by a house built for himself at Hampstead (1876), and others in Queen's Gate, Kensington. The town-houses of his design on the Chelsea embankment and in Kensington, and the offices built for the Alliance Assurance Company at the corner of St. James's Street, have a composed dignity of façade along with the space and ease of interior convenience. Two good examples are the houses which he built in Hampstead for the portrait-painter, Edwin Longsden Long [q.v.]. For city architecture, however, his masterpiece of this period is New Scotland Yard; its tiers of official rooms and its official material of ‘convict’ granite are combined with masterly planning and monumental effect; but it is the only public building for which Shaw's genius was utilised. No commission came to him from the universities; his church-buildings, e.g. at Bournemouth, belong chiefly to the early years of his practice; and, though the Harrow Mission church in Latimer Road, Notting Hill, and All Saints', Leek, are of the later period, no cathedral building was put in his hands. The opportunity for big architecture came, however, in commissions for two great country houses, Chesters, Northumberland, and Bryanston, Dorset. The palatial expression of nobleness, as we recognize this in the Italian villa or the French château, has nowhere in this last hundred years been given such distinction as at Bryanston, built from 1890 to 1894 for Viscount Portman. Unfortunately, the lay-out of the domain was taken out of the architect's hands, and so the conception remains an incomplete one.
In the last years of the nineteenth century, Norman Shaw, owing to renewed ill-health, was relinquishing active practice. He gave up his office, and in 1909 he retired from the Royal Academy. But public authorities often consulted him about their building problems, and to his advice we owe some attempts to give our English capital city a dignity worthy of its imperial position. But, as with Wren so with Shaw, the projects for straightening out the haphazard muddle of London were mostly blocked. Before his scheme for Regent Street could be extricated from the slough of mixed opinions and vested interests he died at Hampstead, 17 November 1912.
Critics have blamed Norman Shaw for his carelessness of the constructive proprieties in which he, as a Gothic architect, had been strictly bred. In his breakaway into ‘Queen Anne’ he was found rearing solid house-fronts on steel skeletons, and plastering brickwork with half-timber veneers and barge-board frillings—stylistic scenery which has been vulgarized ad nauseam at the hands of imitators. But all Victorian architecture must needs come under the same censure—it has been a profession of pedantry paid for by fee. The architect of the 'seventies or 'eighties could not be an artist, like the painter or the sculptor, with work executed and acclaimed as his. Only by partnership with a client was a Victorian architect able to get to work at all; his genius was conditioned by the necessity of gaining and keeping a practice. It was in this that Norman Shaw stood out among his fellows. His was a magnetic personality ​and its influence worked on all with whom he came in contact. Alone among Victorian architects he may be credited with founding a school which is by no means limited to his pupils and immediate contemporaries. He was a great architect in virtue of a great ability, by address and mastery of mind. Yet in the eyes of those brother architects it was not the success but the sincerity of his art that made the salt of his genius; in the words of Sir R. T. Blomfield: ‘Norman Shaw was an artist absolute and ingrained. His whole power was concentrated on the art that he loved and to which he dedicated his life; and from the ideal he never swerved.’
[Private information; personal knowledge.]
E. S. P.