Building the Georgian City - Review

Magazine Antiques, July, 1999 by Alfred Mayor

The nuts and bolts of Georgian building

James Ayres approaches urban building in Georgian England as the artisan he once was when he worked on building sites and assisted architectural sculptors, of whom his father was one. He aspires to celebrate "the building craftsmen of the post-medieval pre-industrial past, men for whom making and designing were simultaneous activities." The commingled function of architect and craftsman evolved only gradually during the eighteenth century, with the emergence of the best craftsmen as general contractors.

Ayres proceeds as methodically as a contractor from "The Site and its Preparation" through "Building Supplies" and "The Timber Trades" to "Plasterers and Painters," without whom a house would not be habitable. In the course of this exploration many tricks of many trades are revealed. When scaffolding consisted of poles and planks, the fasteners of hemp cord were wetted down before being knotted, shrinking and tightening as they dried. Any subsequent loosening could be corrected by driving wedges into the knots. For obvious reasons, old sailors made excellent scaffolders. Before the advent of water-powered mills, sawyers in pairs made planks from logs. One worked in a pit below the log and the other above it, pushing and pulling the long, double-handled saw. The work was very hard and very boring, "but it also required great skill and judgement on the part of the 'top sawyer'; contradictory demands which were not easily met," Ayres writes. As a result, sawyers often spent half their wages on drink.

In Norway, pines destined for the building trades were topped months before being felled. This caused the sap to rise in an attempt to repair the wound, and in so doing created long-lasting timber. The logs were then dried slowly so as not to split, sometimes wrapped in cow dung, sometimes buried in a granary. The freshly cut boards were then sometimes seasoned in salt- or freshwater.

The section on plumbers is a chastening reflection of the old adage, "plus ca change, plus ca reste la meme chose." Plumbers by definition monopolized lead work (plumbum being the Latin for lead). This meant they had control of the flashing on roofs and around chimneys, gutters and downspouts, cisterns, sash weights for windows, the leading in windows before the advent of wooden glazing bars, and even making lead coffins, for those who could afford them. Already in the 1780s plumbers were paid 3s. 4d. a day compared to 2s. 2d. a day, which was the average for the other building trades. Owing to the high cost of lead, the apprenticeship of a plumber was even more expensive than that of a jeweler. Understandably, plumbing was a lucrative closed shop. An example was the plumber Thomas Atwood (d. 1775) of Bath, who became one of the town's richest citizens and a major property developer.

The illustrations are as varied as the subject matter, and most of them are of the period. They range from William Hogarth's Five Orders of Periwigs of 1761, parodying the architectural orders in design books, to Fitz Hugh Lane's serene Lumber Schooner at Evening on Penobscot Bay of 1860. There is even a step-by-step diagram of how to make an artisan's hat from a sheet of newspaper. It appears next to a painting of a joiner's shop of about 1813 in which the workers wear exactly these hats.

The excellent glossary is a tremendous help to readers threading their way through the technical terms of the eighteenth-century building trades.

Indians in photographs

The National Museum of the American Indian has a collection of ninety thousand photographs of the Indians of the Western Hemisphere. Two hundred are reproduced in this book of essays by Indians and non-Indians about the collection, George Gustav Heye (1874-1957) who assembled it, and the much debated issue of whether the pictures portray their subjects realistically.

Using a fortune of nearly $10 million he inherited in 1915, Heye collected everything made by and representing Indians. Beginning with a hide shirt in 1897, he ended up with more than a million objects. Many of these were acquired on ethnographical and anthropological field trips that Heye financed, most of them before 1930. In addition to having the objects photographed in situ to record how they were used or worn, Heye purchased the work of other photographers, who were on balance a rum lot. Among them was General Nelson A. Miles, a famous Indian fighter in the 1870s and 1880s, who nonetheless "believed the Natives could be redeemed by civilization. He advocated education and instruction in agriculture and husbandry, and endorsed policies to rescind the 'protected' status of Indians on the reservation." Paradoxically, George Heye himself "didn't give a hang about Indians and he never seemed to have heard about their problems in present- day society," according to one of his associates.

In the early days after the introduction of the daguerreotype about 1839, the photograph was hard put to rival the precise drawings possible with the aid of a camera lucida. This simple, portable device consisted of a prism on a stick with a clamp at the other end to attach it to the drawing board. By peering into the prism, the artist saw the scene before him reflected in all its detail on his paper, ready to be traced. In the early 1840s the Englishman Frederick Catherwood, armed with his camera lucida, and the American explorer John Lloyd Stephens, armed with his daguerreotype camera, recorded the Mayan ruins at Uxmal in Yucatan, Mexico. The daguerreotypes suffered from the bright light of YucatAn, which bleached out some details and left others in deep shadow. By contrast, Catherwood's camera lucida drawings were exact except for groups of Mayans he added for local color and scale. Both drawings and photographs were submitted to the engravers who made the illustrations for Stephens's Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843).