Clarity or Camouflage? The Development of Constructional Polychromy in the 1850s and Early 1860s

My earlier article inArchitectural History43, ‘Christ Church, Streatham, and the Rise of Constructional Polychromy', showed that James Wild's church of 1840–42 was, in its use of coloured masonry, far ahead of its time (Fig. 1). It preceded, by about a decade, the High Victorian fashion for constructional polychromy usually associated with John Ruskin's pronouncements on colour, contained inThe Stones of Venice(1851 and 1853) and William Butterfield's contemporaneous church of All Saints, Margaret Street (1849–59). The article argued that the interest in polychromy had, in fact, started much earlier in the century. The use of colour in ancient Greek architecture had been investigated and debated by the Institute of British Architects, under the guidance of Thomas Leverton Donaldson, in the 1830s while, in the 1840s, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin gave constructional polychromy a moral quality — an expression of honesty in construction — at the Grange and St Augustine's Church, at Ramsgate (1845–50).