Wrought from Nature, Cast by Design: An Ecocritical Study of Thomas Jeckyll’s Norwich Gates
by Kate Hublou
… go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction, rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing; believing all things to be right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth.1
The above quote, taken from John Ruskin’s (1819–1900) first edition of Modern Painters (1843), is often considered a mantra of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.2 This principle of “truth to nature” served as Ruskin’s call-to-action for young artists, specifically painters, to base their practice upon close observation of the natural world. The passage inspired artists such as John Everett Millais (1829–1896) and William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) to painstakingly record the idiosyncrasies of every veined leaf and bent branch in their paintings. Likewise, designers experimented with similar visual effects with diverse materials and utilitarian object-forms.
This essay explores the early work of one such designer, Thomas Jeckyll (1827–1881). Jeckyll first gained prominence with the display of his Norwich Gates, a pair of cast and wrought-iron gates, at the 1862 London International Exhibition. Little is known of this elusive architect-designer, but his friendship with the painter Frederick Sandys (1829–1904) and association with Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) connect him with the Pre-Raphaelites and, in turn, the writings of Ruskin.3 Such connections lay the groundwork for this essay’s assertion that Jeckyll’s Norwich Gates serve as a bold expression of Ruskinian naturalism. His design oeuvre has been vastly understudied, with the bulk of existent scholarship discussing the influence of Japonisme on his work of the late 1860s and 1870s.4 Returning to the beginning of Jeckyll’s prolific career, this essay argues that the designer’s allegiance with Ruskin’s philosophy can be found in the abundant use of naturalistic details and employment of wrought iron instead of modern cast iron for ornamentation of his Norwich Gates. Analysis of the gates, their display and reception at the International Exhibition, and their ultimate home at the royal countryside estate of Sandringham, further reveals that these gates were emblematic of burgeoning ecocritical thought spurred by Ruskin’s pervasive writing.
In tandem with his “truth to nature” tenet, Ruskin placed great significance on “truth to materials.” In his 1849 publication The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Ruskin takes specific issue with the ubiquitous use of cast-iron ornamentation. Believing the mass-production of such objects through the use of molds to be unnatural and deceitfully imitative of authentic and traditional hand-forged wrought iron, Ruskin pleads for the craftsman’s return to “the common iron of the middle ages [which] was as simple as it was effective.”5 Jeckyll’s Norwich Gates reflect Ruskin’s concerns by using cast iron only for the underlying structure and wrought iron for the entirety of its ornamentation.6
As the only gates at the International Exhibition that combined wrought iron with a cast-iron skeleton, Jeckyll’s Norwich Gates were visually and structurally different from the other ironwork on display. Indeed, they even contrasted with the actual building, given that the Crystal Palace was constructed entirely of cast iron and glass.7 Although the other exhibited gates of gilded iron would have gleamed brightly in the sunlight streaming through the large glass panes of the Crystal Palace, the Norwich Gates reveled in their cool galvanization. Jeckyll made no attempt to veneer the stark surface of the gates; instead he opted to expose the material’s raw beauty. This decision lent a sense of purity and allowed visitors to more fully appreciate their design and craftsmanship without distraction. One reviewer noted the historical significance of these choices, stating “These gates are a fine example of the blacksmith’s craft. They are made entirely by the hand, with hammer and pincers, as they would have done 500 years ago. . . .”8 Given the awe at their level of craftsmanship, it is not surprising that Jeckyll’s Norwich Gates were awarded a medal “for excellent workmanship in wrought and cast-iron park gates.”9
In addition to praising the quality craftsmanship of the gates, critics and visitors alike were enthralled by the astounding accuracy of the foliage decoration. Comprising a variety of indigenous plants, including hawthorn, ivy, wild rose, convolvulus, bryony, smilax, and periwinkle, the gates evoked an English garden and were a fitting design for a park environment.10 The faithful depictions of England’s native vegetation were made possible by the method of production Jeckyll encouraged as designer and superintendent. Critic J.B. Waring was privy to this process, which he detailed in his 1863 account Masterpieces of Industrial Art and Sculpture at the International Exhibition, 1862:
[the workman] endeavouring to follow, as nearly as possible, the design prepared for him, at the same time keeping before him actual specimens of all the natural productions which he was to represent; and thus each leaf and flower is characterized by individuality and truth to nature.11
Waring’s description reveals a work environment which emphasized close observation of and fidelity to the natural world, a clear alignment with Ruskin’s 1843 call-to-action.
While the construction and initial reception of the Norwich Gates reveals a reverence for nature based in materiality and design, their subsequent use challenges this association from an ecocritical perspective. During the International Exhibition, the gates were purchased by the public and presented to Albert Edward, then the Prince of Wales, as a wedding gift.12 Soon after, they were installed at the entrance to Sandringham, his royal estate in Norfolk. In their new home, the gates primarily functioned as a boundary device in this cultivated park-like setting, dividing the private estate’s surrounding environment. To aid in this new purpose, cast-iron fencing sectionals were added to span the estate’s entrance. This new fencing denoted a clear border between public spaces and restricted access. Multiple iron castings from the same molds had been used for such a purpose since the early eighteenth century in churches and cemeteries.13 The Norwich Gates were therefore participating in a long history of visual language and material culture that was understood by the Victorian individual.
As boundary devices, whether installed for reasons of safety or propriety, cast-iron gating became increasingly common in parks and other natural settings during the nineteenth century. In discussing the miles of cast-iron railings used at seaside resorts, researcher Paul Dobraszczyk argues that they served to differentiate “between the built-up urban resort and the uncultivated beach and sea.”14 Dobraszczyk goes on to discuss several Victorian authors who considered the railings and their environments to be democratic spaces for introspection. Ruskin was not in agreement with his contemporaries. Instead, he took great offence to cast-iron railings used as boundaries, proclaiming them to be anything but inspiring. As early as 1858, Ruskin lectured on “The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art, and Policy,” exclaiming:
. . . we cast our iron into bars—brittle, though an inch thick— sharpen them at the ends, and consider fences, and other work, made of such materials, decorative! . . . If it were asked of us by a single characteristic, to distinguish the dwellings of a country into broad sections . . . the uncomfortable and unprincipled parts of a country would be the parts where people lived among iron railings, and the comfortable and principled parts where they had none.15
Ruskin’s issues with cast-iron railings extended to their material, their function, and even their obstruction of a “free sight of nature.”16
Scholar David Carroll asserts that Ruskin’s frustrations with cast-iron railings were deeply personal.17 As a devout man, Ruskin viewed the application of such fencing onto natural landscape to be a sacrilege. To Ruskin, it marked the end of society’s reverence for “Nature,” then understood as the earthly manifestation of God’s work. Carroll contends that this belief becomes especially apparent in Ruskin’s later writings. Citing passages from his Fors Clavigera letters (1871–84) and autobiography Praeterita (1885–89), Carroll writes “Iron railings become a potent symbol for Ruskin’s wide-ranging anger and despair, especially later when they begin to invade nature’s sacred sites . . . the marking out of the sacred by the profane implies and incites danger and contagion.”18 By the end of the nineteenth century, Ruskin felt strongly that God’s Arcadia had become defiled by urban industry epitomized by cast-iron boundary devices.
Although Ruskin was a proponent of banning all iron railings and fencing from the British landscape, he conceded that for other architectural devices much of vegetation’s “quaint beauty of character,” when rendered in wrought iron, was “majestic and impressive to the highest degree.”19 As this essay has examined, this sentiment was apparent in the foliage ornamentation on Jeckyll’s Norwich Gates, despite later augmentation of cast-iron fencing and subsequent complacency in the contagion Ruskin so despised. Designed for a park environment, Jeckyll anticipated the permanent home of the gates to be among leaves, branches, and wildflowers. In accordance, he purposefully incorporated accurate translations of these plants in wrought iron. This adherence to Ruskinian naturalism is ultimately what garnered the Norwich Gates wide admiration at the 1862 London International Exhibition, upending the period’s fervent criticism of iron. Jeckyll’s thorough understanding and application of Ruskin’s ecocritical principles is ultimately what launched his career and forged his path to becoming one of the most prolific British designers of the 1860s and 1870s.
____________________
Kate Hublou
Kate Hublou is Research Associate of Applied Arts of Europe at the Art Institute of Chicago. In May 2019 she graduated with an M.A. in Art History and Museum Studies from Case Western Reserve University where she focused her studies on modern British and Scandinavian art and design.
____________________
Footnotes
1. John Ruskin, Modern Painters (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1843), 418.
2. Tim Barringer, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 57–95.
3. One thoroughly researched monograph on Thomas Jeckyll has been published, see Susan Weber Soros and Catherine Arbuthnott, Thomas Jeckyll: Architect and Designer, 1827–1881 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); for more on Jeckyll’s social circles during the 1850s and 1860s, see Soros and Arbuthnott, Thomas Jeckyll, 30–47.
4. Soros and Arbuthnott, Thomas Jeckyll, 207–236; Paul Dobraszczyk, Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain: Myth and Modernity, Excess and Enchantment (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 58–59, 257–260; Linda Merrill, The Peacock Room: A Cultural Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 20–27; and Stephen Calloway and Lynn Federle Orr, eds., The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement, 1860–1900 (London: V&A Publishing, 2011), 153–155.
5. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (New York: John Wiley, 1849), 46.
6. Ruskin was not the only critic appalled by the over abundant use of cast iron in architectural design, however for the purposes of this essay I have chosen to focus on his statements. For a detailed listing of primary source material expressing displeasure with cast iron see Dobraszczyk, Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain, 11–13.
7. For more on the reception of the Crystal Palace’s decorative ironwork, see John W. Stamper, “London’s Crystal Palace and Its Decorative Iron Construction,” in Function and Fantasy: Iron Architecture in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Paul Dobraszczyk and Peter Sealy (New York: Routledge, 2016), 25–48. After the 1851 International Exhibition, the Crystal Palace was dismantled and reinstalled at Sydenham where the subsequent London international exhibitions were held. For more on the Crystal Palace’s history after 1851, see Kate Nichols and Sarah Victoria Turner, eds., After 1851: The Material and Visual Cultures of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).
8. Robert Hunt, Handbook to the Industrial Department of the International Exhibition, 1862, vol. 1 (London: Edward Stanford, 1862), 400.
9. J.B. Waring, Masterpieces of Industrial Art and Sculpture at the International Exhibition, 1862, vol. 2 (London: Day & Son, 1863), unpaginated.
10. Cassell’s Illustrated Exhibitor… The International Exhibition of 1862 (London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1862), 23.
11. Waring, Masterpieces of Industrial Art, unpaginated.
12. Soros and Arbuthnott, Thomas Jeckyll, 207.
13. Marian Campbell, Decorative Ironwork, (London: V&A Publications and New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 23–24.
14. Dobraszczyk, Iron, Ornament, and Architecture in Victorian Britain, 137.
15. John Ruskin, “Lecture V: The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art, and Policy: A Lecture delivered at Tunbridge Wells, February 16th, 1858,” in The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 16, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1904), 388.
16. See footnote no. 1 in Ruskin, “The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art, and Policy,” 391.
17. David Carroll, “Pollution, Defilement and the Art of Decomposition,” in Ruskin and Environment: The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Michael Wheeler, (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995), 58–75.
18. Ibid., 67.
19. Ruskin, “The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art, and Policy,” 394.