The Pictorial handbook of London : comprising its antiquities, architecture, arts, manufacture, trade, social, literary, and scientific institutions, exhibitions, and galleries of art : together with some account of the principal suburbs and most attractive localities ; illustrated with two hundred and five engravings on wood, by Branston, Jewitt, and others and a new and complete map, engraved by Lowry . y this time become an admitted and esta-blished rule, that these, and many other parts of buildings (infact, to define them in short, all necessary or useful parts), were ex-cluded from the a
The Pictorial handbook of London : comprising its antiquities, architecture, arts, manufacture, trade, social, literary, and scientific institutions, exhibitions, and galleries of art : together with some account of the principal suburbs and most attractive localities ; illustrated with two hundred and five engravings on wood, by Branston, Jewitt, and others and a new and complete map, engraved by Lowry . y this time become an admitted and esta-blished rule, that these, and many other parts of buildings (infact, to define them in short, all necessary or useful parts), were ex-cluded from the architects province—not expected to appear in hisdrawings, and, in the actual execution, made allowance for, as neces-sary evils, invisible to the practised and tutored eye, which isexpected to see the building not as it stands (and always will standwhile in use), but as it would appear with the necessary blots, theobjects of vulgar utility, abstracted. In fact, architecture had nowbecome, to all intents, a fine art; one whose business was orna-ment; not to make, but to apply and combine ornament; and theornaments given it as its materials were—the useful members ofancient building. Strange, that an art professing only to adorn, andignoring vulgar use, can find nothing to take as ornaments except jobjects of use! We thus learn, then, that when these ornaments were) SOMERSET HOUSE. 201 ^—s tCD. PL\N OF THE CENTRE AND WEST WING OF SOMERSET HOUSE. made, the practice must have been just the reverse of the present;their ornaments must have been their objects of use, and their objectsof use their ornaments; as we have seen was the case in the Jirst ageof English art: whereas, now, the very term ornament impliessomething useless, so that all the members of a building are divisibleinto two classes,—objects of use, and ornaments; i. £., things without,beauty, and things without use; things which the eye abhors, butmust suffer because they are necessary, and things which the purs
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1850, bookidpictorialhan, bookyear1854
