EW Godwin by Aileen Reid
The first monograph on EW Godwin for 75 years. Author Aileen Reid suggests that his 1870s’ artists’ studio-houses in Chelsea, including Whistler’s famous White House, owed more to his Gothic Revivalism in the 1850s and 1860s than at first appears, demonstrating the continuities in his ideas from buildings to theatre to wallpaper.
The architect Edward William Godwin (1833–86) was a key figure in the Aesthetic Movement that began in the 1870s, influenced by Japanese design and a belief in art for art’s sake. He was the lover of the actress Ellen Terry and was friends with Oscar Wilde and the painter James McNeill Whistler. Such celebrity connections, combined with Godwin’s disdain for convention, have helped to frame previous discussion of his buildings, furniture and decorative design.
In this new book, the first on Godwin in more than 25 years, Aileen Reid argues that his early work as a Gothic Revivalist is far more significant than previously recognised. By looking at Godwin’s ideas through the prism of his architecture Reid overturns the notion of Northampton Town Hall as an immature preamble to the striking simplicity of his 1870s studio-houses in Chelsea, including the White House for his friend Whistler. Instead, she demonstrates the continuities in his career; that all his design work – buildings, journalism, furniture, textiles and theatre – was governed by a set of principles that, although they evolved radically in how they were expressed, remained remarkably consistent, and were informed to the end by his reading of John Ruskin.
To illustrate it are many newly taken photographs by a leading architectural photographer, and drawings in the tradition of the Survey of London.
Author Aileen Reid has been a historian on the Survey of London at UCL since 2005. This book is the result of working on and off on Godwin for 40 years.
