Thomas Rickman

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Thomas Rickman (June 8, 1776 - January 4, 1841), was an English architect who was a major figure in the Gothic Revival.

He was born at Maidenhead, Berkshire, into a large Quaker family, and avoided the medical career envisaged for him by his father, a grocer and druggist; he went into business for himself and married his first cousin Lucy Rickman in 1804, a marriage that estranged him from the Friends. The failure of his business dealings in London and the death of his first wife left him despondent: the long walks into the countryside that he took for his state of mind were the beginning of his first, antiquarian interest in church architecture. All his spare time was spent in sketching and making careful measured drawings, and classifying medieval architecture, at first through its window tracery, into the sequence that he labelled "Norman" "Early English", "Decorated English" and "Perpendicular English", names that have remained in use, which he was already employing in his diaries^[1] in 1811; he gained a knowledge of architecture which was very remarkable at a time when little taste existed for the beauties of the Gothic styles. The Encyclopedia Britannica 1911 reported that "in 1811 alone he is said to have studied three thousand ecclesiastical buildings". In September that year he gave the first of a series of lectures on medieval architecture at the small Philosophical Society of Liverpool, which he had joined.

His first publication was an article on Gothic architecture for Smith's Panorama of Arts and Sciences (Liverpool), which was separately published in 1817 as An Attempt to discriminate the Styles of English Architecture from the Conquest to the Reformation, 1817, the first systematic treatise on Gothic architecture and a milestone in the Gothic Revival. It was reprinted several times and founded Rickman's public reputation. He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquariesin 1829.

[edit] Rickman's architectural practice

As an architect, Rickman was self-taught. When in 1818 a large grant of money was made by the government to build new churches, Rickman sent in a design of his own which was successful in an open competition; thus he was fairly launched upon the profession of an architect, for which his natural gifts strongly fitted him. Rickman then moved to Birmingham, and by 1830 became one of the most successful architects of his time. He built churches at Hampton Lucy, Ombersley, and Stretton-on-Dunsmore, St George's at Birmingham, St Philip's and St Matthew's in Bristol, two in Carlisle, St Peter's and St Paul's at Preston, St David's in Glasgow, Grey Friars at Coventry, and many others. He also designed the new court of St John's College, Cambridge, a palace for the bishop of Carlisle, and several large country houses.

Rickman attracted a large share of the Church Building Committee's patronage in the new churches built in the West Midlands pursuant to the Church Building Act of 1818. Rickman's transitional Gothic style, that later designers looked down on as "Church Commissioners' Gothic", did not stand the more rigorous scrutiny of better-informed historicists in the age of photography. The Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911 said of his churches "These are all in the Gothic style, but show more knowledge of the outward form of the medieval style than any real acquaintance with its spirit, and are little better than dull copies of old work, disfigured by much poverty of detail." A later, more generous critic, Sir Howard Colvin, has remarked:

"He was no ecclesiologist. If the detailing of his buildings was unusually scholarly, the planning remained Georgian, and the total effect of most of his churches is thin and brittle, if by no means unattractive"^[2]

Rickman nevertheless played an important part in the revival of taste for medievalism perhaps second only to Pugin. His Attempt to discriminate the Styles of Architecture in England shows painstaking research, and ran through many editions.

Rickman died at Birmingham on the 4th of January 1841. He was married three times: first to his cousin, Lucy Rickman of Lewes; secondly to Christiana Hornor; thirdly to Elizabeth Miller of Edinburgh, by whom he had a son and a daughter.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Howard Colvin, 1993. A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600-1840 3rd ed.

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.