File:Pictorial Handbook of London (1854), p. 233 – Somerset House.jpg

Identifier: pictorialhandboo00weal (find matches)
Title: 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
Year: 1854 (1850s)
Authors: Weale, John, 1791-1862
Subjects:
Publisher: London : Henry G. Bohn
Contributing Library: Harold B. Lee Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Brigham Young University

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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 purseigrudges, but must pay for, because without them there would be noibeauty. Out of these two opposite materials it is expected to makelunity and harmony; harmony between utility and uselessness, and(between beauty and ugliness. The task is utterly hopeless. Har-mony in building is peculiar to the ages that employed neither of k 3 202 ULTIMATE STATE OP REPRESENTATIVE ARCHITECTURE.
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SOMERSKT HOUSE. these things—to those in which architecture was not a fine art—in which there were no fine arts—no distinction between useful andfine—because the two qualities had not been abstracted—becauseno one had entertained the idea of making things either without useor without beauty. Abstracting, then, its objects of use, the work of Chambers hasmuch merit, excelling most of Wrens in breadth and repose, and allof them in purity of detail, which he studied more than any otherEnglish architect, and in which he excelled even Jones. In allqualities related to grandeur, however, he falls far short of the latter;and in invention, whether constructive or decorative, cannot benamed with the former. The total divorce of use and beauty seems to characterize the endof the third period, that of rule, and to prepare or usher in the LONDON ARCHITECTS, MEMOIRS OF. 203 fourth, that of licence—that of many styles—that which can representthe works of every age but itself—and rep

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