Just as some pets and their owners come to resemble one another, so some architects have the physical characteristics of their buildings. Of none was this more true than the great American Victorian architect Henry Hobson Richardson, who was as massive, as heavy, as wide and as striking as such masterpieces as Trinity Church, Boston. A portrait by the fashionable Anglo-German painter Hubert Herkomer depicts the bearded architect squeezed into a chair, his colossal stomach threatening to burst out of a double-breasted waistcoat (Fig. 2). And it was owing to the encounter with Herkomer that Richardson was commissioned to design his only building in Britain, indeed his only work outside the United States: the painter’s own house at Bushey in Hertfordshire.
In assembling a catalogue of lost and saved Victorian buildings to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Victorian Society this year, it seemed to me that one of the saddest disappearances was that of ‘Lululaund’, as Herkomer named his studio-house. Built of white tufa from Bavaria and red sandstone, it was much more remarkable – and solid – than the houses that successful contemporary artists such as Frederick Leighton, Luke Fildes, Marcus Stone, Edwin Long or even Whistler built for themselves in London to the designs of Norman Shaw, E.W. Godwin and other British architects. Above a plinth of courses of rugged stone, a wide segmental arch straddled and wrapped around two round turreted towers below a patterned gable – so typical of Richardson (Fig. 4).
He never saw the completed building, nor did he supervise its construction. In fact, all he provided for Herkomer was a front elevation design (Fig. 3) in return for his portrait, and very soon afterwards, in April 1886, he died. But the architect did in fact know England. Two decades earlier, when younger and thinner, he studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. On visits to his tailor in London he took the opportunity to see new buildings by the leading High Victorian gothic revivalists, such as Street, Butterfield and Burges. Although making the crucial substitution of the round romanesque arch for the pointed gothic profile, Richardson’s libraries, railway stations, houses and public buildings in the United States, were – like Lululaund – not different in spirit from the work of his British contemporaries, just more rugged and massive and, in many ways, better.
Richardson’s elevation was based on a plan prepared by Herkomer, who was solely responsible for the interiors. He later recalled Richardson telling him to ‘play all over it with my imagination’. To judge by descriptions endorsed by the tantalisingly few photographs of the interior that survive, the rooms were German gothic rather than Richardsonian romanesque, extravagantly enriched with elaborate carving executed by himself and members of his family. The principal bedroom had a copper ceiling and ‘richly carved walls entirely covered with gold leaf’. The hall and staircase were lined with panels of redwood, three feet wide and 30 feet high. The dining room was decorated with a relief frieze of female figures, illustrating ‘Human Sympathy’ and lit by concealed electric lights. Best of all must have been the drawing room with its music gallery and vast arched chimneypiece with interlaced mouldings (Fig. 1).
Herkomer was a much more interesting figure than his somewhat lugubrious realist canvases and established Academician status might suggest. He was of Bavarian peasant stock, the son of a builder and woodcarver who arrived in Southampton in 1857. Having studied at the South Kensington School as well as in Munich, Herkomer soon achieved success both as a portraitist and as the painter of such popular canvases as The Last Muster and by 1873 was able to buy a cottage in Bushey – then still a rural area outside London. The much grander house that he later built there was named after his second wife, Lulu Griffiths. Her sudden death after less than two years of marriage was a great shock. Herkomer subsequently wished to mary Lulu’s sister, but to do this he had to return to Bavaria and take German citizenship, as such a union was illegal in Britain before the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act in 1907. He then returned to Bushey, bringing with him a ‘von’ to add to his name, as well as the third Mrs Herkomer, and resumed British citizenship, eventually acquiring a knighthood.
Herkomer did much for Bushey. In 1883 he established an art school in the village, and although most of his pupils were not distinguished William Nicholson studied there for a time. He was an enthusiast for the new, keen on electric light and motor cars – sponsoring races in Bavaria – and he planned the interior of Lululaund to be practical, with the kitchen upstairs to avoid smells. Versatile as well as prodigiously hard-working, he built a theatre in the grounds where he staged ‘pictorial-music-plays’ that he partly wrote and designed himself. Later, the theatre was replaced by a cinema, for Herkomer directed and acted in several films that were released commercially.
Herkomer’s remarkable career exemplifies the close cultural ties that existed between Britain and Germany in the 19th century. Perhaps it was a mercy, therefore, that he died early in 1914, just before the outbreak of the world war that would release the hatreds that poisoned so much of the rest of the century. As for Lululaund, it was used for a time by the Bushey Film Corporation before falling derelict, ‘the haunt of tramps, courting couples and schoolboys’. It was pulled down in 1939, on the eve of another world war. But a small portion of Richardson’s facade survives: the front door and its tympanum, now the entrance to a club. This precious, mighty fragment, so powerful and original in design, still testifies in England to the genius of one of the greatest of American architects.