Barry, Rev.Alfred

The architect of the New Palace at Westminster. A reply to a pamphlet by E.Pugin, Esq., entitled “Who was the art-architect of the Houses of Parliament”. Second edition.

London, John Murray 1868.

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A rare pamphlet by Alfred Barry, the clergyman son of the architect Sir Charles Barry, published in response to a pamphlet of 1867 written by the architect Edward Welby Pugin, in which Pugin had argued that it had been his father, A.W.N.Pugin, rather than Sir Charles Barry, who had been the design genius responsible for the Houses of Parliament building as rebuilt after the fire of 1836. Fortunately for the Barry family, Edward Pugin’s assertion that the design drawings submitted by Barry that had won him the competition for the new Houses of Parliament had merely been copied by Barry from drawings made for him by Edward Pugin’s father was readily disprovable by testimony from Thomas Talbot Bury, still alive in 1867-8 and a close associate of both Barry and Pugin, but the controversy was vigorously conducted on both sides, and it resulted in the publication of much useful evidence as to the nature of A.W.N.Pugin’s contribution to the detail of the designs for the interior of the Houses of Parliament, which had in retrospect not been fully recognised in Alfred Barry’s biography of his father which had appeared just before the pamphlet warfare broke out. For this second edition of Alfred Barry’s pamphlet, Barry added seven pages of additional text responding to a further pamphlet by Edward Pugin which had appeared in the intervening period, and he prints the text of statements by Talbot Bury and by Sir Charles Barry’s long-standing confidant, J.L.Wolfe, demonstrating that it was his father, Sir Charles Barry, and not Pugin’s father, who had been responsible for the design drawing for the throne in the House of Lords of which an actual photograph appears as the pamphlet’s frontispiece.