Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt (28 July 1820 – 21 May 1877) was a British architect and art historian who became Secretary of the Great Exhibition, Surveyor of the East India Company and the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge.[1]
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Born in Rowde, Wyatt trained as an architect in the office of his elder brother, Thomas Henry Wyatt. He assisted Isambard Kingdom Brunel on the London terminus of the Great Western Railway at Paddington Station (1854) and later designed a considerable expansion to the Temple Meads station (1871–8) in Bristol. He also enlarged and rebuilt Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge (1866: now the Judge Institute of Management). He designed the Rothschild Mausoleum in the Jewish Cemetery at West Ham.[2]
In 1851, Wyatt produced the book The Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century, an imposing imperial folio in two volumes which illustrates a selection of items from the Great Exhibition of 1851[3]. The book, which has won widespread acclaim for the quality of its plates, appeared in two parts, with the first dated October 1, 1851, through to the extra illustrated title-pages dated March 15, 1853. There are 160 chromolithographed plates produced by a team of skilled artists and lithographers such as Francis Bedford, J.A. Vinter and Henry Rafter.
He was appointed to the post of Surveyor of the East India Company in 1855, shortly before its role in governing India was taken over by the Crown, and subsequently became Architect to the Council of India. In this role he designed the interiors of the India Office in London (1867: now part of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office) and the Royal Indian Engineering College (1871-3: now the Runnymede campus of Brunel University).