Greek Revival architecture

The **Greek Revival** was an architectural movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, predominantly in Northern Europe and the United States. A product of Hellenism, it may be looked upon as the last phase in the development of Neoclassical architecture. The term was first used by Charles Robert Cockerell in a lecture he gave as Professor of Architecture to the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 1842.

With a newfound access to Greece, or initially the books produced by the few who had actually been able to visit the sites, archaeologist-architects of the period studied the Doric and Ionic orders. In each country it touched, the style was looked on as the expression of local nationalism and civic virtue, and freedom from the lax detail and frivolity that was thought to characterize the architecture of France and Italy, two countries where the style never really took hold. This was especially the case in Britain, Germany and the United States, where the idiom was regarded as being free from ecclesiastical and aristocratic associations.

The taste for all things Greek in furniture and interior design, sometimes called Neo-Grec, was at its peak by the beginning of the 19th century, when the designs of Thomas Hope had influenced a number of decorative styles known variously as Neoclassical, Empire, Russian Empire, and Regency architecture in Britain. Greek Revival architecture took a different course in a number of countries, lasting until the Civil War in America (1860s) and even later in Scotland.

## Rediscovery of Greece

Despite the unbounded prestige of ancient Greece among the educated elite of Europe, there was minimal direct knowledge of that civilization before the middle of the 18th century. The monuments of Greek antiquity were known chiefly from Pausanias and other literary sources. Visiting Ottoman Greece was difficult and dangerous business prior to the period of stagnation beginning with the Great Turkish War. Few Grand Tourists called on Athens during the first half of the 18th century, and none made any significant study of the architectural ruins.

It would take until the expedition funded by the Society of Dilettanti of 1751 by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett before serious archaeological inquiry began in earnest. Stuart and Revett's findings, published in 1762 (first volume) as *The Antiquities of Athens*, along with Julien-David Le Roy's '**Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce'** (1758) were the first accurate surveys of ancient Greek architecture.

Meanwhile, the rediscovery of the three relatively easily accessible Greek temples at Paestum in southern Italy created huge interest throughout Europe, and prints by Piranesi and others were widely circulated. Access to the originals in Greece itself only became easier after the Greek War of Independence ended in 1832; Lord Byron's participation and death during this had brought it additional prominence.

## Britain

Following the travels to Greece of Nicholas Revett, a Suffolk gentleman architect, and the better remembered James Stuart in the early 1750s, intellectual curiosity quickly led to a desire to emulate. Stuart was commissioned after his return from Greece by George Lyttelton to produce the first Greek building in England, the garden temple at Hagley Hall (1758–59). A number of British architects in the second half of the century took up the expressive challenge of the Doric from their aristocratic patrons, including Benjamin Henry Latrobe (notably at Hammerwood Park and Ashdown House) and Sir John Soane, but it was to remain the private enthusiasm of connoisseurs up to the first decade of the 19th century. An early example of Greek Doric architecture (in the facade), married with a more Palladian interior, is the Revett-designed rural church of Ayot St Lawrence in Hertfordshire, commissioned in 1775 by Lord Lionel Lyde of the eponymous manor. The Doric columns of this church, with their "pie-crust crimped" details, are taken from drawings that Revett made of the Temple of Apollo on the Cycladic island of Delos, in the collection of books that he (and Stuart in some cases) produced, largely funded by special subscription by the Society of Dilettanti. See more in Terry Friedman's book "The Georgian Parish Church", Spire Books, 2004.

Within Regency architecture the style already competed with Gothic Revival and the continuation of the less stringent Palladian and neoclassical styles of Georgian architecture, the other two remaining more common for houses, both in towns and English country houses. If it is tempting to see the Greek Revival as the expression of Regency authoritarianism, then the changing conditions of life in Britain made Doric the loser of the Battle of the Styles, dramatically symbolized by the selection of Barry's Gothic design for the Palace of Westminster in 1836. Nevertheless, Greek continued to be in favor in Scotland well into the 1870s in the singular figure of Alexander Thomson, known as "Greek Thomson".

## North America

Thomas Jefferson owned a copy of the first volume of *The Antiquities of Athens*. He never practiced in the style, but he played an important role introducing Greek Revival architecture to the United States. In 1803, he appointed Benjamin Henry Latrobe as surveyor of public building in the United States, and Latrobe designed a number of important public buildings in Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia, including work on the United States Capitol and the Bank of Pennsylvania.

Latrobe's design for the Capitol was an imaginative interpretation of the classical orders not constrained by historical precedent, incorporating American motifs such as corncobs and tobacco leaves. This idiosyncratic approach became typical of the American attitude to Greek detailing. His overall plan for the Capitol did not survive, though many of his interiors did. He also did notable work on the Supreme Court interior (1806–07), and his masterpiece was the Basilica of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, Baltimore (1805–21).

Latrobe claimed, "I am a bigoted Greek in the condemnation of the Roman architecture", but he did not rigidly impose Greek forms. "Our religion," he said, "requires a church wholly different from the temple, our legislative assemblies and our courts of justice, buildings of entirely different principles from their basilicas; and our amusements could not possibly be performed in their theatres or amphitheatres." His circle of junior colleagues became an informal school of Greek revivalists, and his influence shaped the next generation of American architects.

The second phase in American Greek Revival saw the pupils of Latrobe create a monumental national style under the patronage of banker and hellenophile Nicholas Biddle, including such works as the Second Bank of the United States by William Strickland (1824), Biddle's home "Andalusia" by Thomas U. Walter (1835–36), and Girard College, also by Walter (1833–47). New York saw the construction (1833) of the row of Greek temples at Sailors' Snug Harbor on Staten Island. These had varied functions within a home for retired sailors.

At the same time, the popular appetite for the Greek was sustained by architectural pattern books, the most important of which was Asher Benjamin's *The Practical House Carpenter* (1830). This guide helped create the proliferation of Greek homes seen especially in northern New York State and the Western Reserves of Ohio.

From 1820 to 1850, the Greek Revival style dominated the United States, such as the Benjamin F. Clough House in Waltham, Massachusetts. It could also be found as far west as Springfield, Illinois. Examples of vernacular Greek Revival continued to be built even farther west, such as in Charles City, Iowa.

This style was very popular in the south of the US, where the Palladian colonnade was already popular in façades, and many mansions and houses were built for the merchants and rich plantation owners; Millford Plantation is regarded as one of the finest Greek Revival residential examples in the country.

Other notable American architects to use Greek Revival designs included Latrobe's student Robert Mills, who designed the Monumental Church and the Washington Monument, as well as George Hadfield and Gabriel Manigault.

## Polychromy

The discovery that the Greeks had painted their temples influenced the later development of the style. The archaeological dig at Aegina and Bassae in 1811–12 by Cockerell, Otto Magnus von Stackelberg, and Karl Haller von Hallerstein had disinterred painted fragments of masonry daubed with impermanent colours. This revelation was a direct contradiction of Winckelmann's notion of the Greek temple as timeless, fixed, and pure in its whiteness.

In 1823, Samuel Angell discovered the colored metopes of Temple C at Selinunte, Sicily and published them in 1826. The French architect Jacques Ignace Hittorff witnessed the exhibition of Angell's find and endeavoured to excavate Temple B at Selinus. His imaginative reconstructions of this temple were exhibited in Rome and Paris in 1824 and he went on to publish these as '**Architecture polychrome chez les Grecs'** (1830) and later in '**Restitution du Temple d'Empedocle a Selinote'** (1851). The controversy was to inspire von Klenze's '**Aegina'** room at the Munich Glyptothek of 1830, the first of his many speculative reconstructions of Greek color.

Hittorff lectured in Paris in 1829-1830 that Greek temples had originally been painted ochre yellow, with the molding and sculptural details in red, blue, green and gold. While this may or may not have been the case with older wooden or plain stone temples, it was definitely not the case with the more luxurious marble temples, where color was used sparingly to accentuate architectural highlights.

Similarly, Henri Labrouste proposed a reconstruction of the temples at Paestum to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1829, decked out in startling color, inverting the accepted chronology of the three Doric temples, thereby implying that the development of the Greek orders did not increase in formal complexity over time, i.e., the evolution from Doric to Corinthian was not inexorable. Both events were to cause a minor scandal. The emerging understanding that Greek art was subject to changing forces of environment and culture was a direct assault on the architectural rationalism of the day.

## Notes

1. ↑ J. Turner (ed.), *Encyclopedia of American art before 1914*, New York, p. 198..
2. ↑ British Museum entry for the Antiquities of Athens
3. ↑ Though Giles Worsley detects the first Grecian influenced architectural element in the windows of Nuneham Park from 1756, see Giles Worsley, "The First Greek Revival Architecture", *The Burlington Magazine*, Vol. 127, No. 985 (April 1985), pp. 226-229.
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Template:Citation.
5. ↑ *The Journal of Latrobe*, quoted in Hamlin, *Greek Revival* d1944), p. 36 (Dover Edition).
6. ↑ Gebhard & Mansheim, *Buildings of Iowa*, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993 p. 362.
7. ↑ Jenrette, Richard Hampton (2005). *Adventures with Old Houses*, p. 179. Wyrick & Company.

## References

### Primary sources

* Jacob Spon, *Voyage d'Italie, de Dalmatie, de Grèce et du Levant*, 1678
* George Wheler, *Journey into Greece*, 1682
* Richard Pococke, *A Description of the East and Some Other Countries*, 1743-5
* R. Dalton, *Antiquities and Views in Greece and Egypt*, 1751
* Comte de Caylus, *Recueil d'antiquités*, 1752–67
* Marc-Antoine Laugier *Essai sur l'architecture*, 1753
* J. J. Winkelmann, *Gedanken uber die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst*, 1755
* J. D. LeRoy, *Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce*, 1758
* James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, *The Antiquities of Athens*, 1762–1816
* J. J. Winkelmann, *Anmerkungen uber die Baukunst der alten Tempel zu Girgenti in Sicilien*, 1762
* J. J. Winkelmann, *Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums*, 1764
* Thomas Major, *The ruins of Paestum*, 1768
* Stephen Riou, *The Grecian Orders*, 1768
* R. Chandler et al., *Ionian Antiquities*, 1768-1881
* G. B. Piranesi, *Differentes vues...de Pesto*, 1778
* J. J. Barthelemy, *Voyage du jeune Anarcharsis en Grèce dans le milieu du quatrième siecle avant l'ère vulgaire*, 1787
* William Wilkins, *The Antiquities of Magna Grecia*, 1807
* Leo von Klenze, *Der Tempel des olympischen Jupiter zu Agrigent*, 1821
* S Agnell and T. Evens, *Sculptured Metopes Discovered among the ruins of Selinus*, 1823
* Peter Oluf Brøndsted, *Voyages et recherches dans le Grèce*, 1826–30
* Otto Magnus Stackelberg,  *Der Apollotempel zu Bassae in Arcadien*, 1826
* J. I. Hittorff and L. von Zanth,  *Architecture antique de la sicile*, 1827
* C. R. Cockerell et al., *Antiquities of Athens and other places of Greece, Sicily, etc.*, 1830
* A. Blouet, *Expedition scientifique de Moree*, 1831-8
* F. Kugler, *Uber die Polychromie der griechischen Architektur und Skulptur und ihr Grenze*, 1835
* C. R. Cockerell, *The Temples of Jupiter Panhellenius at Aegina and of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae*, 1860

#### Architectural Pattern Books

* Asher Benjamin, *The American Builder's Companion*, 1806
* Asher Benjamin, *The Builder's Guide*, 1839
* Asher Benjamin, *The Practical House Carpenter*, 1830
* Owen Biddle, *The Young Carpenter's Assistant*, 1805
* William Brown, *The Carpenter's Assistant*, 1848
* Minard Lafever, *The Young Builder's General Instructor*, 1829
* Minard Lafever, *The Beauties of Modern Architecture*, 1833
* Thomas U. Walter, *Two Hundred Designs for Cottages and Villas*, 1846.