Overview

The most significant phase of his early career was spent as Chief Assistant to the architect J. D. Sedding (1838-91), collaborating with him on designs for Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Street, London. On Sedding’s sudden death he took over the business, completing several important commissions his late master and mentor had left unfinished.

Increasingly, however, he felt drawn towards the arts associated with architecture rather than to the business concerns of architectural practice. While designing some striking independent buildings of his own, his talents were most effectively expressed in church plate and furnishings, sculpture, jewellery and the metalworking arts. His remarkable achievements in those areas range from the silver chalice and breathtaking green marble fittings he created 1898-1910 for St. Bartholomew’s Church, Brighton, to the interior schemes of the 1890s for great houses like Douglas Castle, Lanarkshire and Welbeck Abbey, Nottinghamshire; from jewels glowing with enamel and semi-precious gems to great bronze entrance doors or the monumental Elphinstone Tomb (1910-26).

As contemporaries attested, it was hard to get him to talk much about his own work; this reticence, however, did not apply to his views on art, design and craftsmanship generally: his talks and public lectures show him as an inspired, passionate and engaging communicator. Fellow members of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society fully recognised this talent in electing him their President, as which he served 1915-22, while the Art Workers’ Guild made him Master in 1917. His words reached craft practitioners and students well beyond these circles via his seminal book ‘Silverwork & Jewellery’ (1903), and through the teaching he undertook at leading art schools in London and Birmingham.

Examples of Henry Wilson’s work may be found throughout the UK – from Cornwall to Scotland, from Kent to Wales - and still further afield, in the US. There, in Boston, in 1922, he began designing the bronze entrance doors for the HQ of a leading tea importer, while in the early 1930s he completed his designs for the bronze bas-relief West doors of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York. This would prove to be his final commission, and might be regarded as the greatest of his works, not only in respect of its dimensions (the 4 leaves each measuring 18’x 12’) but also in terms of the complexity, inventiveness and eloquence of the modelling.

Wilson himself would have been pleased that he reached such heights, especially in this particular art – sculpture. Writing to his brother Edgar c.1927, he explained ‘I have not got to the top in sculpture yet, but I hope to before I go over to the other side…’

His ex-studio assistant Brown Morrison thought that by the end of his life he had indeed achieved this ambition, deeming the Collett and Skarret family graves that Wilson designed for the churchyard of St. Mary the Virgin, Kemsing, Kent, ‘some of the loveliest sculptures I know’.

Longstanding friend, colleague, fellow Guildsman and one of Wilson’s obituarists, the architect Francis William Troup (1865-1935), would have shared the belief that Wilson had fulfilled his aspiration regarding sculpture, confidently asserting that it would be for the Elphinstone Tomb above all that Wilson would be remembered.

Nowadays, however, it is his jewellery that most readily comes to mind: in fact, some people are not fully aware that he was an influential architect.

Formative Elements

From childhood, Henry Wilson was encouraged to draw and to study design. When the family moved from Liverpool, where both parents had been teachers at the Collegiate School, he returned as a pupil there, lodging in term-time with a family in Everton. In the holidays he joined the family in Cleobury Mortimer, Shropshire, where his father had become headmaster of the village school.

Later, after graduating from Kidderminster School of Art, he entered the practice of respected architect E. J. Shrewsbury, as an improver (an assistant on a nominal wage enhancing his skills). He worked there for about 2 years in its office in Queen Street Chambers, Maidenhead, Berks., the building having been designed by Shrewsbury himself. The pargettingon it is typical of E. J. Shrewsbury’s essentially local stance in relation to architecture. Providing what the town required, in an unpretentious style appropriate to local needs, his approach to building was direct and revolved around frequent site-visits to the work in hand.

Wilson's next job was in London, with John Oldrid Scott (1841-1913). One of the famous Gothic dynasty, J. O. Scott was a devotee of the 14th century manifestation of the style, as well as being a sensitive church furnisher. A keen advocate of architects understanding the crafts that contribute to a building, he was also renowned as a designer of church plate, and a restorer of old churches – it was in the course of one such restoration that Wilson was entrusted with his first recorded work, designing the reredos at South Marston church.

When, in 1888, the position arose of Chief Assistant to the sensitive, innovative architect John Dando  Sedding, whose affinity with the gothic was profound, Wilson jumped at it. This new post, with so craft-driven and individualistic a designer, was particularly appealing, given that Belcher was about to embark on designing the HQ of the Institute of Chartered Accountants. This was to be a grandiose Baroque edifice - albeit one incorporating sculpture by Arts and Crafts sculptor Hamo Thorneycroft - the scale and corporate feel of which was neither Wilson’s nor Sedding’s natural territory.

Wilson immediately clicked with his Sedding, who took Wilson on on the strength of their initial discussions about design, and a perusal of his sketchbooks.

Friends and Colleagues

Already working in the office, or soon to join it, were several up-and-coming architects who would form the core of the Arts and Crafts movement in the 1890s – Ernest Gimson, Beresford Pite, Christopher Whall, John Paul Cooper. A crucial link was formed with the office of Sedding’s exact contemporary, Richard Norman Shaw, in the person of Gimson, whose brother, Sidney, was working there with other rising architects completing their training, including Ernest Barnsley and Robert Weir Schultz, and, most significantly for Wilson, William Richard Lethaby. Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, Lethaby’s 1891 book, would have a profound influence on him - so much so that the symbols, shapes, structures of the ‘universal architecture’ discussed within its pages would consistently permeate Wilson’s own subsequent designs.

Lethaby’s illustration of the ideal temple standing ‘foursquare’ at the centre of the world is echoed in the concept of the baldacchino enclosing the altar, both structures appearing in Wilson’s sanctuary of 1898-92 for St. Bartholomew’s Church, Brighton.

A direct practical outcome of working amidst such an original peer group was Wilson's friendship with Thomas Phillips Figgis – then a young architect in Sedding’s office – which lead onto their collaboration in the competition for the free public library, Ladbroke Grove, London: this incorporated a symbolic ‘tree of Knowledge’ on its façade and Art Nouveau features, as seen in the window of the General Reading Room. The first of these was lost to budgetary constraints, though the second survives. Had the original scheme been borne out as planned, the resulting building would surely have justified its description as one of the first examples of British Art Nouveau; the cuts to which the scheme fell prey were probably an early factor in Wilson’s decision to get out of architecture.

The major works of the Wilson/Sedding era

In Sedding’s office the possibilities offered by architecture seemed thrilling. After working with him on the Church of the Holy Redeemer, Exmouth Market, London – daring in its use of Renaissance rather than Gothic inspiration, and well underway by the time Wilson arrived in the office – Wilson became immersed in the building of Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Street. This project was extraordinary for the range of artists and craftsmen working, as a team, in its creation. It was like an old guild in action, with Sedding, the inspiring, coordinating architect. At the same time, there were restoration commissions reaching the office, work in which again Sedding excelled, his sensitivity to making repairs or necessary additions exceptional amongst his contemporaries.

Sedding died with the Sloane Street church unfinished. Knowing his late master’s views so intimately, Wilson stepped into his place and proceeded, seamlessly, with the project, along with the several other unfinished works to which the practice was committed, including St. Peter's Church, Ealing. At the same time fresh, incoming commissions were arriving, including that for St Mark's Church, Brithdir.

The independent architect espousing the guild ethos

 

At Welbeck Abbey, the old riding school was converted into the Chapel and Library, both later decorated by Wilson. This large commission represented one of the most impressive examples of the projects undertaken in the 1890s in the mood J.D. Sedding had pioneered, that of a modern guild: Wilson could call upon the talents of an informal, variously-constituted team of craftsmen (Pomeroy, Whall, Davison etc), all of whom understood the value of individual skills mobilised in a common creative cause.

Another similarly concerted effort was seen at Wynyard Hall the stately Georgian house of Lord Londonderry. Works by Whall, Pomeroy etc., all working under Wilson, featured in the Chapel and the proposed Monument Room.

Sedding had built St. Martin’s Church, Marple, Cheshire, in the mid-1870s. Wilson completed it with the addition of a N. aisle c. 1895. He called on Whall’s skills for the vivid plasterwork. Wilson himself also designed the Lady Altar cross, altar gates, silver wafer box and gilded iron font cover; later on he made a Bronze war memorial panel c.1918, depicting a complex figure scene, unusual in bearing his name in the bottom right-hand corner. The very clarity of the name suggests how deeply Wilson shared the sense of loss surrounding the Great War; by this time, Sedding’s son had been killed on the Western Front.

A familiar pattern was established of one commission leading to another: this was the case in relation to the work Wilson carried out at Far Headingley, Leeds – an altar cross, and the grave for Rev. Stables (both 1907) led directly to the Ripon pulpit of 1913, paid for with a bequest from Stables, organised by his widow Emily.

Sometimes work came simply as a result of his reputation for rich symbolism that preceded him: he was renowned for the Brighton and Sloane Street commissions, and admirers of such work could depend on him, when commissioning him for their own projects, to produce something equally redolent of tradition, meaning, sensitivity to materials. The Westminster processional cross, made for the Anglo-Catholic Conference of 1923, was a case in point.

 

Henry Wilson: Practical Idealist discusses Wilson's work throughout the UK and in North America, including works in silverwork, jewellery, sculpture and architecture as well as his yet unexplored work as an exhibition designer and his influential teaching at the Royal College of Art, at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, and at the Vittoria Street School for Silversmiths and Jewellers in Birmingham .

Drawing on original archives, biographical details and insights from family members, this is the first published study devoted wholly to him and his work.

For further details:
Henry Wilson: Practical Idealist
by Cyndy Manton
(Lutterworth Press, 2009).