J. Mordaunt Crook on William Burges, reviewed by Geoffrey Tyack

One of the most surprising architectural discoveries in Oxford awaits anyone who opens the inconspicuous door leading from the 18th-century loggia of Worcester College into the chapel.

Here, in a plain Georgian framework, is a rich treasure-chest of Victorian craft: walls brightly painted in the style of the Italian Renaissance; colourful stained glass; woodwork bristling with carvings of animals (including a rhinoceros); mosaic floors; and a marble candelabrum that would not have looked out of place in a Roman imperial villa.

The man responsible in 1864-9 for this lavish paean of praise to God was William Burges, hailed in J. Mordaunt Crook's scholarly and beautifully produced book as “the greatest art-architect of the Gothic Revival. . . Pugin reborn: Pugin without the incense”. Like his Pre-Raphaelite contemporaries, Burges saw in medieval and Early Renaissance art, architecture and craft a form of escapism from industrial society: the High Victorian Dream of the book’s subtitle. But it was also a means of reinvigorating Britain’s visual culture.

To go forward it was necessary to go back, to an age when art was valued for its own sake and not as a commodity. So, in his most ambitious architectural commissions — the spectacular cathedral at Cork, the restorations of Cardiff Castle and Castell Coch in South Wales, his own house in Melbury Road, Kensington, and, even more, in his extraordinarily imaginative furniture, metalwork and jewellery — Burges succeeded in making tangible the strange, exotic and sometimes claustrophobic vision of the distant past which has inspired poets and prophets from Tennyson and Ruskin to the present day.

Crook’s book is an expanded and revised version of a monograph of 1981. Weighing a formidable 3kg, it celebrates Burges’s work in its historical and cultural context.

Burges the man is brought to life, but so too is his world, and that of his clients and his friends — who included Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Oscar Wilde.

Vividly written and superbly illustrated, this book can be read and enjoyed by anyone with an interest in the Victorians and their complex and fascinating artistic achievement.