William Burges was the son of a prosperous civil engineer; educated at King's College, London, and articled to Edward Blore in 1844. In 1849 he went into the office of Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt where he worked on drawings of mediaeval metalwork for Wyatt's large book, Metalwork, which appeared in 1852. In 1855 and 1856 Burges made prize-winning designs for Lille Cathedral and the Crimea Memorial Church in Constantinople, but neither building was carried out; his first important ecclesiastical design to be realised being St Fin Barre's Cathedral, Cork, which he began in 1862. In this same year with William Slater he devised the Mediaeval Court for the International Exhibition in London on behalf of the Ecclesiological Society with whom he had been involved since 1845; his knowledge of metalwork and mediaeval antiquities in general was greatly respected.

In his decorative work he tempered his expert knowledge with a quirky sense of humour, he said himself: "There are some people who . . . consider mediaeval art as eminently ecclesiastical, and therefore profoundly serious to be approached with caution, forgetting that mankind has been very much the some in every age, and that our ancestors joked and laughed as much as we do." This attitude is exemplified repeatedly in the ornamental details of his decorative work. Burges stamped his personality unmistakably on the commissions which he undertook for the Marquess of Bute at Cardiff Castle and in the designing of his own house in Melbury Road. — Architect-Designers from Pugin to Mackintosh

Churches

Homes for Rich and Very Rich

Monuments and Memorials

Miscellaneous

Mosaics, Metalwork, Furniture, Ceramics, and other Design

References

Architect-Designers from Pugin to Mackintosh. Exhibition catalogue. London: The Fine Art Society with Haslam & Whiteway Ltd., 1981.

The Fine Art Society, London, has most generously given its permission to use information, images, and text from its catalogues in the Victorian Web. This generosity has led to the creation of hundreds and hundreds of the site's most valuable documents on painting, drawing, sculpture, furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, metalwork, and the people who created them. The copyright on text and images from their catalogues remains, of course, with the Fine Art Society. [GPL]

Crook, J. Mordaunt. "Burges, Wiliam (1827-1881)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Viewed 23 August 2009.

_____. The Dilemma of Style: Architectural Ideas from the Picturesque to the Post-Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

_____. William Burges and the High Victorian Dream. Revised and Enlarged Edition. London: Francis Lincoln, 2013' [Review by Jacqueline Banerjee.]

Long, Helen. The Edwardian House: The Middle-Class Home in Britian, 1880-1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993.

Saint Fin Barre's Cathedral and the Lewis Glucksman Gallery. Searching for the New Jerusalem: The Iconography of St Fin Barre's Cathedral, with a Foreword by the Very Revd Nigel Dunne. Cork: Lewis Glucksman Gallery and the University of Cork, 2013. [Review by Jacqueline Banerjee.]

Williams, Matthew. William Burges, 1827-81. Andover, Hants: Jarrold Publishing (Pitkin Guide), 2007.

Wood, Richard. "Searching for the New Jerusalem." In the Saint Fin Barre's Cathedral and the Lewis Glucksman Gallery's Searching for the New Jerusalem: The Iconography of St Fin Barre's Cathedral. 9-13.


Last modified 13 November 2019