Main Content
Summary
Author: Buckler, John Chessell
Title: An historical and descriptive account of the royal palace at Eltham.
Publication: London, “printed by and for J.B. Nichols and Son” 1828.
Price: Sold
Reference: 10093
Full Description
8vo. Engraved frontispiece, (4) + 108pp, two unrelated litho views of Sir Francis Boynton’s house at Burton Agnes, Yorkshire, bound in. Traces of offsetting on title leaf from facing engraved frontispiece. Contemporary quarter morocco, marbled boards, neatly rebacked. Jill Allibone’s copy, with her bookplate. The copy also contains a pencil presentation inscription dated 16 May 1851.
First and only edition of a scarce and neglected book that provides the best general review published up to that time of English domestic architecture of the late mediaeval and Tudor periods. Its author, the architect and architectural illustrator John Chessell Buckler (1793-1894), had then recently rebuilt Costessey Hall, Norfolk, for its Roman Catholic owners, Lord and Lady Stafford, in a Tudor revival style based on that of Thornbury Castle in Gloucestershire. When in 1828 public interest was aroused in the preservation of the surviving mediaeval hall of Eltham Palace, Buckler took the opportunity to issue the present book, dedicated to Lady Stafford, combining his own detailed notes and observations on the remains of the palace with a general introduction on the history of English domestic architecture and incidental references to some ninety significant buildings, mainly of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These reflect his personal knowledge of many of the buildings concerned, not all of them then familiar to architects and antiquaries (he draws attention to Clevedon Court, Somerset, of which the older part “exhibits noble simplicity and correctness of design”, although he is not enamoured of its west front “within half a century ... rebuilt in the Chinese Gothic fashion”). Buckler was indeed a somewhat more significant figure both as a writer and an architect than recent scholarship has acknowledged, for in his History of the Gothic Revival Eastlake hails Buckler’s Costessey Hall as “one of the most important and successful instances of the Revival in Domestic Architecture”, and adds to the list of Buckler’s architectural commissions given by Colvin the restorations of two other Norfolk country houses for Roman Catholic landowners. Recorded in NUC from copies at Library of Congress and University of Pennsylvania only. BAL Cat 475.