Introduction to 'The Light of Truth and Beauty'

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“...I would ask you to turn and look for a moment at the Acropolis of Athens, as it appeared when Greece was the light of the world. A great rock rises from amidst the wide spread city. Its battlemented walls follow the irregularities of the precipice, here assuming the shape of a tower or bastion, there some form of grace that suggests a sacred purpose. But the chief objects are the Parthenon and its companions. And now let us shut our eyes to all outward things, let us draw a curtain over what ever architectural combinations of gorgeousness or of gloomy grandeur that may have found place in the gallery of the imagination, and let us gaze with the eye of the soul upon this most wonderful sight. John saw ‘the Holy City, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of Heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.’ What do we see here? A group of beautiful forms, so full of thought that they seem to think. They seem possessed of some high, contemplative, rapturous kind of life altogether different from any of the ordinary or natural sorts. We see no indication of progressive development as in plant life, no motion as in animal life; they neither move nor are moved, but sit upon that rock as upon a throne, high and lifted up in the sight of all the people, in the sight of all the gods...”

It is rare to find high ability in both designing and writing in one architect. The most creative are often inarticulate, or at least silent, while those who write are usually uninspired designers. ‘All this talk about art is dangerous,’ Edwin Lutyens often complained, ‘it brings the ears so forward that they act as blinkers to the eyes.’ But this was not true of Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson of Glasgow. In him we have one of the most original and creative architects of the nineteenth century, one who did more than any other to make Glasgow distinctive, and who was also an eloquent speaker. His was a voice which did not reach far at the time, for Scotland tended to be ignored in the pages of the London journals, but it was none the less powerful as well as passionate. Thomson spoke independently of current taste. In his buildings and the handful of his writings that survive he made a most unfashionable defence of the potential merits of the architectural language of the Greeks in the age of John Ruskin and Gilbert Scott. He argued for Classicism against Mediaevalism, for trabeation against the arch, for creative thought against the mindless reproduction of past styles, for the relevance of timeless laws by which tradition could come to terms with contemporary conditions, for a rational, resonant modern architecture beyond fashion and sentimental associations.

And this he did in a rich and vivid language. What we have of Thomson’s writings are all texts for public lectures, and they manifest true eloquence. He had certainly read and studied John Ruskin – “no one more eloquent or more amiable, no one who has said more good and true things about Art” – and, like those that oil The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Thomson’s sentences echo the cadences of King James’s Bible. As with Ruskin’s sermons, indeed, Thomson’s polemics seem to come from the pulpit as much as from the rostrum. Whatever the differences in their attitude to the representation of Nature in art (and Thomson devoted considerable time in his first Haldane Lecture to refuting Ruskin’s arguments), both men had a Scottish Presbyterian background in common (along with that other great thunderer, Thomas Carlyle). Thomson came from a large and close family, and his many brothers and uncles were teachers, ministers and missionaries. This was an environment which conditioned his thought, for behind all his arguments about architecture and reason there was an immanent sense of the Divine, of a Creator who was responsible for all that was worthwhile and beautiful.

But Thomson insisted that the accurate copying of Nature was not essential to “true Art.” “The aesthetic faculty appears to serve three purposes – the perceptive, the selective, and the creative.” And as for the last, he wrote – thinking of Ruskin,

Some say that man can never get beyond his experiences. Whence then come Music and Architecture? There is nothing in Nature like either; for although they may have been slow of growth the fact before us is that they are something that by man or through his agency has been added to the work of God, and that, not presumptuously or sinfully, as some would tell us, but by destiny and beauty; for being made in the image of God, man was made partaker of the divine nature so far as to become a fellow-worker with God – in however humble a sense, a co-Creator.’

With Thomson, theology and architecture were inseparable; he was, it must be remembered, an elder of the United Presbyterian Church, “a denomination renowned for its devout evangelism, which he wholeheartedly espoused.”[1] And, like Ruskin, he was typical of his time in investing architectural forms with moral qualities – something later generations of Classicists found difficult to accept.

It is clear that Thomson read widely. Born on April 9th, 1817, he was the seventeenth child of his father, who died when he was seven and he was orphaned by the time he was thirteen.[2] We know little of Thomson’s education and the circumstances of his childhood were clearly difficult. He was sent out to work at the age of twelve and destined for a lawyer’s office until rescued by the architect Robert Foote, that civilized and learned Classicist who took the seventeen-year old as a pupil and pointed him in the right direction. Thomson would seem to have been largely self-taught, but the young man had also been sustained by his family, by the learning of the manse and by the emphasis put on intellectual development by the church in which Thomson grew up – one elder brother had studied classical and ancient languages at Glasgow University before becoming a missionary – as well as being encouraged by the Scottish tradition of reverence for education.[3] So, in his wide learning and with his inquiring mind, Thomas was a model, almost archetypal Scot, a true son of the Enlightenment. No wonder that, later, in speaking of the the Greek Revival, he could write that

when Edinburgh was distinguished above other cities for whatever was profound in philosophy, and elegant in literature, she adopted this style as the fittest expression of the high degree of refinement to which she had attained…

and again that

the buildings which constitute the glory of Edinburgh, and which entitle it to be called the modern Athens, were the fruits of that movement and of the concentrated intelligence of British society, which at that time had its seat in our northern capital.

Unfortunately, we do not know what books were in Thomson’s own library.[4] But it is clear that he not only read widely about architecture, historical and contemporary – making himself familiar with Pugin’s true principles if only to refute the claims of the Gothic Revival – but was also well acquainted with the latest ideas in philosophy and science. A comparison in the Haldane Lectures between Roman art and “that kind of voluptuous fulness of habit which critics, in speaking of a certain kind of modern literature, designate as ‘fleshly’’’ suggests an informed knowledge of contemporary writing as well while, as the first of those lectures demonstrates, he was well read in aesthetics. Thomson was anxious to distinguish between the imitative and the ideal, and concluded that there were

the objective and the subjective theories of Art. The first asserts that Art consists in the representation or imitation of what we see with our eyes. The second, that it is the orderly or harmonious expression of what we feel in our hearts or conceive in our imaginations.

He was influenced by Edmund Burke on the Sublime and the Beautiful – with the emphasis decidedly on the former – and was very well versed in Picturesque theory, and in the writings of Uvedale Price in particular.[5] This enabled him to able to treat the language of the Greeks with a novel freedom in his villas and to admire “the extreme irregularity which characterizes the Erectheion... which may be regarded as so many distinct and comparatively complete individual objects to form a group”.[6]

Thomson shared many of the preoccupations of his contemporaries; the Haldane Lectures, in particular, reveal that he had a love of the natural world, and there are charming descriptive passages about plants and animals which show that he observed them very closely. In discussing the oval shape of the “tremendously ugly” Colosseum in Rome, he talked of

the concentrated energy which seems contained in the compact and almost globular form of the eggs of the hawk, as compared with the more elongated and less decided form of those of the majority of what are termed sea-fowl... [and] between these more noticable forms there is a great variety of the most exquisite modifications.

Here, again, he had much in common with Ruskin and with many other Victorians – clergymen and architects above all – who were so interested in natural history and geology. The Memoir of George Thomson... by one of his nephews describes how Alexander and his younger brother and future partner studied natural phenomena together as boys, and read such books as Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne.[7] No doubt they also knew the popular works of that tortured Presbyterian geologist, Hugh Miller.

The Memoir quotes a letter by George Thomson describing how,

when at Moray Place, on passing along the course of a deep sewer which was being formed, and where the clay was thrown out in large blocks on either side, I had the curiosity to open up several of them, which had become somewhat dry, and showed indications of splitting at the laminations… On one of these surfaces I accidently observed the trace of something, very faint, yet indicating an organism of some kind. At first I thought it might be the impression of a long ribbon-like leaf, but there was no variation in the width such as might be expected. I called Alexander’s attention to it, and, after looking at it, he expressed the opinion that it might be the track of an insect, and sure enough there can be no doubt of it...[8]

In this letter, written about 1860, George Thomson went on to note how “the millions of years of our geologists may safely be reduced to the action of a heavy rainfall during a week or so.” For these were no idle speculations but a response to contemporary debate and he had a particular interest in observing “the stratification laid bare in digging foundations for houses or in making cuttings for railways.” The year which saw the building of Alexander Thomson’s Moray Place – “finest of all Grecian terraces” – also saw the publication of Charles Darwin’s book on The Origin of Species. “At a meeting of the Young Men’s Society of the St Vincent Street Church,” we learn that

an essay had been read which evidenced the writer’s whole hearted belief in Darwinism; several criticisms followed, which showed a similar bias on the part of the young members, and at the same time scant respect for the authority of Scripture. While by no means rabid against Darwinism, [George] Thomson held that it was not proved, and that the attempts to prove it involved assumptions as to geologic time which were false.

Such views were not unusual. The implications of geological discoveries and of the notion of the evolution of species were widely discussed long before Darwin wrote his famous book and the geologist, Charles Lyell, published his conclusions on The Antiquity of Man in 1863. A little earlier, in 1857, shortly before the publication of his own book, The Testimony of the Rocks, Hugh Miller had taken his own life, possibly because he was unable to reconcile the chronological implications of his geological discoveries with literal Scriptural authority, so it is not at all remarkable that that Alexander Thomson was well aware of these debates. He may have been a devout Presbyterian – a sometime elder of the Caledonia Road Church – but was no fundamentalist; besides, the United Presbyterian Church was profoundly interested in metaphysical ideas and in modern German philosophy.[9] So Thomson’s lectures displayed a wide understanding of current ideas about evolution and development (which were discussed at meetings of the Philosophical Society of Glasgow). He was certainly not enslaved to a particular vision of the past, and had no patience with an architecture dominated by archaeology; rather, he wanted his contemporaries to

value the suggestions of progress, leading upwards into the light of the future, as highly as they do those associations that lead backwards into the darkness of the past, esteeming the pleasures of hope at least equal to the pleasures of memory.

But what, surely, is remarkable about Thomson is his use of imagery about space and time – an imagery which even invoked the notion of travel to other planets.

If the inhabitants of the distant spheres have the means of scanning in detail the features of our planet, they will not fail to assign to the mason the very first place amongst those who live and labour on the face of this fair world.

he speculated in a lecture in 1859. Foucault and Clerk Maxwell were investigating the nature of light during these years, and in 1849 Fizeau had published his experiments on the velocity of light and showed how the Doppler effect could be used to measure the relative velocity of the stars. So, in the third Haldane Lecture – on Greek architecture – Thomson could tell his audience how

Philosophers, in explaining the nature of light and endeavouring to give us some idea of the rate at which it travels, tell us that some stars are so distant that, although they may have been created thousands of years ago, their light may not yet have reached us; or that if it were possible for us to fly off into space, we might, as we retire, survey backwards, as it were, all the events that have happened on the planet – that we might, by going to a sufficient distance, witness the very first act of its creation...

At least this image is optimistic, unlike, say, William Dyce’s view of Pegwell Bay, that haunting work, painted around 1859, in which the family of the Scottish artist on the beach in Kent near where St Augustine had landed are “dwarfed by the immensity of space, suggested by Donati’s Comet, and by the immensity of time, embodied in the strata of the cliff face.”[10]

But such powerful and extraordinary images in Thomson’s writing do not mean that he necessarily accepted the conventional implications of contemporary ideas about development and evolution. For behind all of Thomson’s thought lies an idea of eternity, an obsession with timelessness. “This striving after the permanent seems to be the soul of Egyptian art. It is an endeavour to realise the idea of eternity”, he wrote, and he aspired after that quality in his own work – in vain, alas. But Thomson believed in eternal laws which must govern architecture: laws about mass, gravity, motion and proportion which would enable the tectonic and aesthetic discoveries of the Greeks inform a modern architecture. For that was the weakness of the earlier generation of Greek Revivalists:

They failed; not because of the scantiness of the material, but because they could not see through the material into the laws upon which that architecture rested. They failed to master their style, and so became its slaves.

Instead, Thomson sought to understand those laws which, to him, were an aspect of the Divine. He talked constantly of those “eternal laws” but also of “divine harmonies,” that is, of ideal proportions which, be believed, could be found in Greek buildings and which seem to have governed his own approach to design (the use of proportional systems has been detected in both the St Vincent Street Church and Holmwood House).

Thomson differed from Burke and other writers on the Picturesque who held that the beauty experienced in certain forms was associational. For him, there were absolutes and ideal proportions that could be discovered through the pursuit of aesthetics; after all, “the Greeks, who carried mental culture to a much higher degree than any other people, devoted their best energies to the study of aesthetics and the aesthetic faculty.” In arguing this, Thomson’s lectures were much indebted, in particular, to the writings of David Ramsay Hay, the influential decorative painter and colour theorist based in Edinburgh who had published several books on proportional and geometrical systems such as Proportion or the geometric principle of beauty analysed (1843), The orthographic beauty of the Parthenon referred to a law of nature (1853), and The harmonic law of nature applied to architectural design of 1856.[11] Hay maintained that behind both ideal proportions in architecture and the employment of the ellipse in design lay study of the human figure, male and female. Thomson concurred, but his Classicism was not simply humane in the Renaissance sense. Speaking of architecture, he insisted that “long before man came to need it, long before the foundation of the world, at the very beginning, in the councils of eternity, the laws which regulate this art were framed.”

In such passages, there is almost an air of mysticism to Thomson’s thought. This aspect of his character was something that contemporaries seem to have recognised, for while, on the one hand – with his brother George – Thomson ran a profitable and successful commercial practice, on the other, as his pupil William Clunas recalled,

“for the strictly professional side of his business he had but little capacity – punctual, he was not, neither was he persevering. You could not say that he was indolent, but there was a dreamy unrest about him even when engaged on important work.”[12]

It was this dreamy unrest that enabled him to enter the Old Testament visions of John Martin and, out of the extraordinary historical architecture that dominated such images, to make an architecture that was real, modern and peculiarly Glaswegian. And this mystical side to Thomson is evident in his insistence that

All who have studied works of art must have been struck by the mysterious power of the horizontal element in carrying the mind away into space, and into speculations upon infinity. The pictures of Turner and of Roberts afford frequent examples of this. The expanding effect which is thus produced upon the mind cannot be overrated.

So there may be much more to Thomson’s buildings than meets the eye. “The form of the temple was not controlled by any utilitarian considerations,” he insisted; “…so the highest powers of the greatest minds were taxed in symbols and in abstract forms and combinations of lines which resulted in the sacred architecture of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks.” And of the modern Glaswegians: Thomson’s three temples for the United Presbyterians are all raised up on platforms, as in  published images of the Temple of Solomon, and sacred (masonic) geometry and proportional systems may be detected in these extraordinary designs. The two columns in the entrance lobby of the St Vincent Street Church could possibly be a reference to the two pillars – Jackin and Boaz – mentioned in the First Book of Kings as being in the porch of the Temple of Solomon, while the strange pairs of caryatids staring at each other high up in the tower might be the cherubim in Moses’ tabernacle as described in the Book of Exodus. Or not. It is not known for certain whether Thomson was a Freemason (as is likely: his sometime partner, John  Baird, certainly was), and all such interpretations of the esoteric must remain speculative.

Much that is extraordinary about Thomson’s architecture is difficult to explain in words: the way he composed his facades out of dynamic structural elements, playing with rhythms of architrave and lintel, solid and void, and exploiting subtle ambiguities of wall plane. At the unveiling of the marble bust of Thomson, given to the city in 1877, one client and friend spoke of the

mystery you are unable to unravel in the plainness of the lower and the ornamentation of the higher portions; yet when you look below there is an elaborate system of ornamentation, which looked at by itself would seem as if the designer wished to make it the chief portion of his work, but which is tantalising in the extreme, when viewed in execution...[13]

His forms are sometimes exotic, resonant with evocations of the Ancient World, of Ninevah and Karnak, and yet so abstract and curiously modern in feeling. And behind it all lies his search for eternal laws: his interest in timeless architectural qualities which could make the Greek modern, and so dismiss the sentimental, associational claims for the superiority of other phases of architectural history, like the Middle Ages. “We do not contrive rules; we discover laws. There is such a thing as architectural truth.”

The ideal of Greece was very important to Thomson, and in contemplating its architectural achievement he moved beyond contemporary ideas about historical development and evolution. In the third Haldane Lecture, he took great pains to refute the notion that Greek architecture was simply derived from the Egyptian, despite his admiration of the latter. “In artistic forms the Greeks aimed at ideal perfection; and in so far as we can comprehend the matter, they attained it.”

It was not just that Greek art represented a high point of development in antiquity, before the Romans debased it – just as, for the contemporary English ecclesiologists (and Ruskin, and Scott), Middle Pointed or Decorated Gothic was adopted as a model because it represented a summit after the rise of Gothic from the Romanesque and before the fall into degenerate Perpendicular (the sort of interpretation which Geoffrey Scott later dismissed as the ‘Biological Fallacy’).[14] Instead, the monuments on the Acropolis represented an ideal, beyond development, beyond time (even though this contradicted his belief in the necessity for architectural progress).

In this apparent conservatism, curiously enough, Thomson had something in common with those younger English Gothicists like Bodley and Gilbert Scott’s eldest son, who rejected the High Victorian experiment in development during these very same years, around 1870. Although of a very different religious outlook to Thomson, these architects also responded to the unsettling implications for Christianity posed by scientific discoveries by proposing instead an absolute ideal of perfection, which happened to be late 14th-century England rather than Greece in the fifth century before Christ. It was a response to “a change which reinforced the sacramental interpretation of a church as a building which stands outside time... In heaven there are no revivals.”[15]

The difference, however, is that these Englishmen still held to Pugin’s belief that Gothic alone was Christian (and Catholic). But such a notion naturally had far less impact in Presbyterian Scotland, where the Greek Revival lasted longer and had deeper roots. For Thomson, the achievements of Egypt and Greece were also part of God’s unfolding purpose, especially as “The Greek civilisation, in particular, had prepared mankind for the Christ and His teachings. This was, and is, theologically orthodox.”[16]

As Thomson insisted in his visionary peroration at the end of the third Haldane Lecture, when he invited his audience to contemplate the buildings on the Acropolis in their former glory – that

group of beautiful forms, so full of thought that they seem to think... We see no indication of progressive development as in plant life, no motion as in animal life; they neither move nor are moved...

Greek architecture was a timeless ideal, an image of perfection beyond history, at once ancient and modern, because it responded to those eternal, God-given laws.

Let us study the principles taught us by the Greeks in so clear a manner, and we will find that they are universally applicable as they are absolutely true.

Alexander Thomson did not write any books or publish any articles (although he seems to have provided the descriptive texts to his own work in that important publication by Blackie & Son on Villa and Cottage Architecture). What survives of Thomson’s writing on architecture are the reports of public lectures that he gave, but we do not have complete texts for all of these for some were only given short notices. This is the case with his celebrated proposal to rebuild the slums of Glasgow with new blocks of tenements separated by glass-roofed streets, which he described in a paper given to the Glasgow Architectural Society in 1868.[17] “Glasgow is notorious for the mortality amongst children;” he said, knowing that truth all too well, having lost four of his own between March 1854 and January 1857 when the city was repeatedly ravaged by cholera.

The first lecture by Thomson of which a record survives date from 1853, when Thomson was 35 years old and still in partnership with his brother-in-law, John Baird. This text, entitled ‘The Sources and Elements of Art considered in connection with Architectural Designs’, is most important as it demonstrates both the subtlety and the continuity of Thomson’s thinking, for many of the arguments he would subsequently develop were first advanced here. As in his Haldane Lectures of two decades later, Thomson discussed the qualities of Egyptian, Greek and Roman architecture, but this lecture was also remarkable for dealing – most sympathetically – with the Islamic and even the Mediaeval. This he could do because, he argued, all architecture responded to universal laws and so “may be appreciated by any man having a properly constituted mind, no matter to what age or country he may belong.” At this time, Thomson was still eclectic, designing in a variety of styles – Gothic, Baronial and Italianate – but although he did not yet make a particular defence of the superiority of the architecture of the Greeks over the Gothic in this early lecture, he could still praise its peculiar refinement and how, “in their hands, matter lost all trace of materiality and marble became pure thought.”

Thomson had an elevated view of the artistic character of his profession and was already aware of the danger posed to creativity by knowing too much – the essential problem faced by architects of his time. “Ours is an erudite generation and seems more anxious to know than to do, but knowledge is power only when under control if we do not keep it in subjection we become its slaves.” And he was concerned to emphasise that archaeological accuracy – whether in Greek or Gothic – was not enough. The Perpendicular may have been the “last properly organised style of architecture which the world has produced” before the revival of Classicism, but “the resources of the architect are not exhausted, and from the variety exhibited in bygone styles it may safely be assumed that as great variety is yet to be displayed in those that are to come… A design is a Creation of the Imagination.” And to those who argued that any “manifestation of vitality” was impossible under modern conditions because the excellence of past styles was the result of centuries of development, Thomson countered that earlier architects “were not possessed of our advantages. Their books if they had any were few, and their field of observation in general confined to the examples afforded by the locality in which they laboured.” In contrast, Thomson (like all his contemporaries) enjoyed access to many books even if he personally chose not to travel.

The next lecture by Thomson to survive dates from six years later, from 1859, when he had been in independent practice for eleven years and in partnership with George for two. By this time he had built a score of villas – including the best, had raised two of his three great churches and was beginning to change the face of Glasgow with his novel designs for tenements and warehouses. He was at the height of his powers and very busy. So the lecture ‘On Masonry, and how it may be improved’ is of interest for the light it sheds on both contemporary building methods in Glasgow and on Thomson’s practice. He was then working closely with John McIntyre, the builder, and William Stevenson, the owner of a stone quarry at Giffnock and the two of them were responsible for building Moray Place. This lecture is also poignant as it suggests an ideal to which Thomson, as an architect – subject, as he was, to the economics and methods of contemporary Glasgow – failed to rise. “There is nothing we more fondly cherish than ‘the longing after immortality’ – the desire to realise duration – nothing more repugnant or humiliating than decay.”

For the irony of Thomson’s striving to build ‘imperishable thought’ is that he was obliged to think in soft, friable Giffnock sandstone – whose weakness has been exacerbated by the wet and polluted climate of Glasgow – rather than in, say, magnificently intractable Aberdeen granite. Perhaps the problems in Glasgow were already evident, which is why Thomson read a paper later that year on ‘Soluble Silicates’, “for the purpose of inducing discussion upon the merits of Ransome’s process for indurating stone with a view to its permanent preservation.”[18]

Most of Thomson’s early lectures were delivered to the Glasgow Architectural Society, which had been founded in 1858.[19] In 1861 he was elected President (eventually serving for two sessions) and he delivered his presidential address on 21st October 1861 in the Scottish Exhibition Rooms in Bath Street (which he had designed). Having modestly claimed to lack the qualities necessary – “to the energy, the tact, the experience, and the ready utterance so essential to the character of a president, I have no pretension” – he discussed the mission of the society, which was to propagate knowledge about the profession so that architect, client and tradesman could work together to secure good architecture. As for the good architect, beyond technical accomplishments he needed

to fill his heart with wisdom, and to exercise his mind with great thoughts, for the aim of his art is to express them. To aid him in so doing, let him search the whole world of nature and art for modes of expression, not that he may quote from them entire and unchanged, but that he may learn from them something of the nature and meaning of lines, of form, of proportion, of light and shade, and of colour. Let his imagination be filled with images rather than his memory with modes.

It was a high ideal.

Earlier, in 1859, John Honeyman, that accomplished designer who would later hire the young Mackintosh, had lectured to the society on ‘Style in Architecture,’ and strongly advocated the superiority of Gothic over the Classic style.’ This was topical as the Battle of the Styles was then raging in London, with George Gilbert Scott’s Gothic design for the Foreign Office being vetoed by the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston. At a subsequent meeting, on 19th December 1859, Honeyman was answered both by Thomson, “in support of the classic or idealistic school,” together with his friend and future biographer, Thomas Gildard, but unfortunately no record of their comments seems to survive.[20] But Thomson returned to the subject in 1863 with ‘A Critical Analysis of the Classic and Mediaeval Styles.’ His full text was not reported, but we know that

the lecturer noted some of the recent work of our popular art-critics, distinguishing between what he considered true and what false teaching. In speaking of the requirements of modern times, he strongly advised members not to use archaic forms in their studies, whether Classic or Gothic, and however much revered through association of ideas; but to exercise thought, and, from the position in which our present civilisation places us, combined with the true principles of beauty, to form a new style of architecture, capable of keeping this art one of the fine arts, as well as a chronicle of the manners of our time... The lecture was profusely illustrated.[21]

The following year, 1864, Thomson spoke about ‘The Unsuitableness of Gothic Architecture to Modern Requirements’ using many of the arguments he would develop in his later attack on Scott’s design for Glasgow University. It has been suggested that some of these may have been inspired by Alexander Christie’s published lecture, ‘On the Adaptation of Previous Styles of Architecture to Our Present Wants,’ which had been delivered in Edinburgh a decade earlier. Christie, a painter and head of the Trustees’ School of Design, seems to have been provoked by Ruskin’s Edinburgh Lectures of 1853 and moved to deny that Greek architecture was ‘unfit for our purposes.’ Rather, he insisted that the Greek system of post and lintel construction was not only being exploited to the full in contemporary architecture and engineering but was also far more flexible than Ruskin and others supposed.[22] These were ideas which certainly appealed to Thomson and which he would develop.

It is clear from Thomson’s 1864 lecture that he was familiar with all the contemporary polemics in favour of Gothic, and was easily able to confound Pugin’s identification of Pointed Architecture with Christianity because

this might have weight with the Romish Church, but to Protestants of any sort, and more particularly Presbyterians, and still more particularly Presbyterian dissenters, the argument seems very absurd, for what has the philosophic Christianity of the Reformation to do with the sensuous ritual of the middle ages? The architecture which was a consistent part of the latter, is diametrically opposed to the former.

Thomson also spelt out the reason why the Gothic Revival was never so successful in Scotland as in England, and why Victorian Gothic Presbyterian churches are such unsatisfactory compromises compared with the churches of, say, Scott – let alone those by Street, Butterfield or Bodley – which embody the revival of Mediaeval liturgical ideas within the Church of England resulting from the Oxford Movement and the work of the Cambridge Camden Society.[23]

The difference between the Roman ritual of the thirteenth century and the Protestant Presbyterian form of worship of the nineteenth century is wide and essential... Instead of being crowded with stone piers, it should be as open as possible. But the mediaevalists never give us such forms. Of course iron pillars and lath and plaster arches are not to be thought of...

Thomson also made a most important distinction between the two styles which illuminates his own approach to design, and the way in which he handled plate glass and treated windows merely as voids between dynamic structural elements.

One striking difference between the Gothic and Greek is that in the first the windows or spaces are the objects treated; whereas, in the latter, it is the piers or solid portions, and these are capable... of being rendered absolutely perfect; but what can we make of a hole in the wall except to ornament it? and this circumstance alone will prevent the Gothic from ever becoming a great or true style, and, therefore, is not suited to this highly civilised and philosophic age.

In fact, Thomson could admire real mediaeval buildings – “What human being can traverse unawed the aisles of a Gothic cathedral?” – and was not always hostile to the Gothic Revival. Some of his earliest works are picturesque villas down the Clyde at Cove which were strongly influences by the illustrations in the publications by J.C. Loudon and also, possibly, by those in Ruskin’s Poetry of Architecture. And in some of these houses he explored the possibilities of an increasingly abstracted Gothic language, with high pitched roofs and the occasional pointed arch (for his fenestration usually conformed to a rational trabeation of mullions and transoms). The history of these villas is difficult to document, and some of Thomson’s highly idiosyncratic interpretations of Gothic ideas (possibly influenced by Pugin’s work) may date from the 1860s, while, for reasons unexplained, he was still willing to include his early design of 1850 for Seymour Lodge ‘in an adaptation of the later Gothic’ in Villa and Cottage Architecture, first published by Blackie in book form as late as 1868.

By 1864, however, the English Gothic Revival had become a menace, for in September of that year the University of Glasgow, having sold its ancient site in the High Street to a railway company, commissioned George Gilbert Scott to design the new buildings on Gilmorehill and, naturally, they were to be Gothic. It was as if the second oldest university in Scotland had turned its back on the land of the Enlightenment in a desire to ape the mediaevalism of Oxford and Cambridge; furthermore, the successful London architect had been chosen without competition. Whatever the reason, this was an insult to the architectural profession in Glasgow, and Scotland, and it provoked one of the bravest architectural outbursts of the 19th century. Two years after Thomson’s examination of the unsuitability of Gothic for modern requirements, he returned to the attack with his ‘Enquiry as to whether the Character and Purpose of a University can be fully expressed in Mediaeval Architecture – and whether the merits of the proposed Plans have justified the University Authorities in going from home for an Architect’ (to use his original appellation – the more tactful title of ‘A Fight against Gothic’ appeared above the abbreviated text printed in the London Builder, whose editor observed that the lecture was “mainly prompted... by a feeling that the Glasgow architects had been slighted by not being asked to send in designs.”).

Thomson’s text remains a remarkable piece of sustained invective, taking apart many of the pretensions of the Gothic Revival in general and the merits of Scott’s design in particular. Certainly he overstated the case and caricatured his enemy, but he also used some telling arguments and turned on its head Pugin’s claim that Gothic was the only true Christian style. This lecture was by far the most powerful blast from the Classical camp in the architectural war between Gothic and Classic – perhaps because it was stimulated by anger as well as by reason; Nikolaus Pevsner described it as “the most comprehensive contribution to the battle of the Styles.”[24] It was also good knock-about stuff written with considerable humour, especially when Thomson contemplated the dynamic nature of Gothic structures and wondered whether

this violent conflict of forces, this incessant struggle between stick and knock-down, may account in some measure for the favour which the style has obtained with a cock-fighting, bull-baiting, pugilistic people like the Anglo-Saxons...

As for the claims for flexibility made by Gothicists,

they prefer the laxity and regardlessness of publicans and sinners, to the prudent cautious self-control which regulates the conduct of the wise and good.

Gilbert Scott normally responded to the slightest whiff of criticism immediately and at length; that he remained silent – even in his Personal and Professional Recollections – is perhaps an endorsement of the justice of Thomson’s onslaught.[25]

This lecture also contained, by implication, a statement of Thomson’s own philosophy and his acute and powerful arguments, combined with the knowledge of what he might have done – if only he had been asked – can only make the reader regret the University’s choice of architect and style. At his best – when he cared and took a personal interest – Gilbert Scott could be good, but surely Thomson was right in this case to note that,

granting that Mr Scott is all that his most enthusiastic admirers would have him to be, everybody knows that his establishment being the most fashionable in the great metropolis, his business is so enormous that, to expect him to bestow more than the most casual consideration upon the work which passes through his office, is altogether unreasonable... Had the University authorities been guided by a competent amount of knowledge and genuine love of art, they would have turned from a workshop of this sort with disgust, and placed their commission in the hands of someone not inferior to Mr Scott in ability, and superior to him in all the other qualities essential to the practice of what was once regarded as amongst the noblest of the arts.

As Thomson remarked elsewhere, mere fashion was a “serious hindrance to progress. Its demands were imperative, and quite independent of and unassailable by reason.” Thomas Gildard later recorded that, “I once asked Mr Thomson why he had never used the Doric; he told me that he had never had a building whose size was worthy of it.”[26]

That remains Glasgow’s loss.

The following year, in 1867, Honeyman confessed to the Glasgow Architectural Society that he had repented, for

I had hoped for better things from the revival of Gothic architecture than we have yet seen. My expectations, perhaps, have been unreasonable, or their realisation may only be deferred; but if this revival is to lead us to nothing better, I fear that there may be too much truth in what a distinguished predecessor in this chair affirmed...[27]

And two years later, Thomson again returned to his attack on Gothic, and other manifestations of “sentimental association” which, along with archaeology, fashion, ignorance and fear of criticism were “obstacles which bar the way to architectural progress.” This lecture, together with his presidential address in 1871 to the new Glasgow Institute of Architects (founded in 1868) might suggest that Thomson was by now disillusioned with all stylistic revivals. The very nature of the Gothic Revival was beginning to be questioned in the years around 1870, and Thomson was possibly responding to anxieties south of the border when he claimed in both lectures that “architecture has all but ceased to be a living art” and that “we ought to have a new style of architecture.”

Such utterances have been used to interpret Thomson as a lonely prophet of Functionalism, a pioneer of the Modern Movement, and, certainly, his rational abstraction of the trabeated Grecian language of Schinkel, combined with his enthusiasm for the possibilities of new materials like cast-iron and plate glass, put him firmly on that path which led to the rectilinear minimalism of Mies van der Rohe. But the story is not that simple, and Thomson was but one of many to confront the besetting dilemma of his time. In 1864 he may have called for “a new style of architecture” but – like Ruskin – he knew that this could not simply be invented but must evolve; hence the experimentation in his own buildings. What Thomson objected to was the mindless copying of historical precedents; what he wanted to see was a personal, imaginative interpretation of tradition, so that “every man will have his own style, as in literature.” It is true that, in both these papers, Thomson did not once mention the word ‘Greek’ but this may have been simply out of tact towards his audiences, who were diverse in their stylistic predilections. Even so, his belief in the continuing relevance of the lessons of Greek architecture is surely implicit in every reiterated reference to those “eternal laws.”

‘How is it that there is no modern style of architecture?’ he asked the Glasgow Institute of Architects. The problem was – as Gilbert Scott once confessed – that architects knew too much history, and Thomson agreed with his hero, the sculptor Canova, that too much knowledge could inhibit the visual sense, for “we often find that increase of knowledge only adds to the mental blindness.” His answer for the architectural profession to the central dilemma of his time was

to abandon with all convenient expedition the whole mass of accumulated human traditions under which we have been, as it were, smothered, and take earnestly to the study of the Divine laws, and by-and-by we shall find it more difficult to keep running in the old rut than hitherto we have found it difficult to get out of it. Let us once fairly comprehend the living law, and we will at once and for ever get freed from the bondage of dead forms.

But Thomson did not really believe in creating a tabula rasa like the less intelligent modernists of a later generation, for

these old forms are not to be despised; far otherwise. They are there for dissection. They are there to teach us what has been already discovered – to place us upon an elevated starting-point for yet higher attainments – to connect our sympathies with the men whose thoughts they represent, and with the Creator whose laws they reveal to us.

And the best of those old forms were, surely, Greek.

Thomson returned to his defence of the continuing vitality of the legacy of the Greeks in his third Haldane Lecture but, as he insisted, “the best way for us to imitate the Greeks is rather to copy their example than copy their work” – ‘Greek’ Thomson was never an archaeologist, merely reassembling literal precedents like so many pedestrian Greek Revivalists of an earlier generation. These Haldane Lectures, delivered in the last year of his life, were to be Thomson’s architectural testament, his principal written legacy. Themes which he kept returning to in his lectures – often repeating particular happy phrases and forceful arguments – were developed in this final triumphant summation of his thought, in which his own theories about architecture were interwoven with relevant lessons from history. As architectural history, the texts are of little value as Thomson derived all his information from books by others, but as an exposition of lessons to be learned from the past, the lectures remain illuminating and inspiring.

The Haldane Lectures were four talks on ‘Art and Architecture’ delivered in the spring of 1874 to what was then properly called the Glasgow School of Art and Haldane Academy. The Haldane Academy of Fine Art was a trust, set up by James Haldane, a Glasgow engraver who died in 1833, which gave an endowment to the Glasgow School of Art and thereby maintained within it an academy dedicated to the pursuit of the Fine Arts distinct from the Government School of Art which taught the curriculum set in South Kensington. Thomson was a trustee, along with several of his clients, such as Robert Blackie and Thomas Annan, and the School was then in the Corporation Buildings, the block in Sauchiehall Street designed by James Smith (father of Madeleine) containing the McLellan Galleries. Of all the special series of lectures on art and architecture arranged by the Trustees, only Thomson’s are remembered today (the first seem to have been given in 1871 by Professor Robert Kerr, the Scottish architect based in London).[28] The audience seems to have been wide; the Glasgow correspondent of the Building News (probably Thomas Gildard) reported that, “as these lectures are addressed to students, they are in some degree elementary. They necessarily contain descriptions of the principal buildings of the world, informing and interesting doubtless to those for whom the lectures are designed, but I dare say the architects in practice and many others who had the privilege of being present, would, from such a man as Thomson, have heard rather criticism and opinion. In an age so realistic as ours, the idealism of Mr Thomson has come in good time to our future architects and artists.”[29]

After initial observations of the nature and purpose of art, Thomson discussed the architecture of the Egyptians, which he greatly admired and learned much from, and then extolled the work of the Greeks before examining and generally regretting what the Romans did with their legacy – arguing, with typical independence of mind, that any admiration for the external appearance of the Colosseum resulted

from the fact that through prejudice we sometimes fail to distinguish between things that are awfully sublime and things that are awfully hideous.

But there was more to the Haldane Lectures than an historical survey of ancient art, for Thomson explored the very nature and purpose of architecture as well as resuming his campaign against the arch and in favour of the lintel, and thus the girder. He also discussed both the aesthetic and moral qualities of certain abstract geometrical shapes in a manner reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s insistence that architecture consisted of the arrangement of certain Platonic forms in light. Thomson extolled the virtues of the pyramid, manifesting that “desire for endless duration,” and the obelisk, whose “poise is perfect, and we regard it as imperishable thought, a symbol of truth and justice.” Perhaps what is most remarkable about the Haldane Lectures is that he discussed the buildings of Egypt, Greece and Rome with such perspicacious intimacy and vividness, for he knew them only through prints, paintings and photographs. For ‘Greek’ Thomson never saw Greece: in fact he never crossed the English Channel.[30] The Haldane Lectures were the product of a sympathetic imagination informed by an acute intelligence.

“Here, for the present, we must stop,” announced Thomson at the end of his fourth and last Haldane Lecture, having discussed the works of the Romans, but he hoped to take the story further the following year. Photographs in his possession of Seville and Cairo suggest that he might have gone on to look at Islamic architecture while Thomas Gildard remembered that

Mr Thomson had admiration for genuine old Gothic work, although he had little sympathy with much of the new, and it was his intention to have visited several of the great English cathedrals, one of his objects being study for the continuation of his lectures.[31]

But what ‘Greek’ Thomson’s mature reflections on the achievements of Mediaeval architecture might have been we can never know. He was not well when he delivered the Haldane Lectures; for some years he had suffered from asthma and bronchitis. Winters, in Glasgow, were an increasing trial to him and he resolved that, if he survived that of 1874–75, he would go abroad for the first time – to Italy – to attempt to recover his health. But it was not to be; the bad weather turned worse and Alexander Thomson died at his home in Moray Place on March 22nd, 1875.

Thirty years on, Reginald Blomfield could claim that “Thomson of Glasgow was possibly the most original thinker in architecture of the nineteenth century.”[32] And, unlike Blomfield and many other proponents of Classicism in the twentieth century, Thomson thought beyond conventional rules. “To the majority of men,” he wrote,

thinking is so extremely irksome that they are ready to resort to any subterfuge, to undergo any amount of labor, rather than encounter it, and so there is a general and constant demand for infallible rules by which things may be done, and for fixed standards by which things may be tested – and all to avoid thought.

Thomson certainly was not afraid of thinking, and the results were so striking and original both in stone and in words that he did more than anyone else to create the distinct architectural character of the Second City of the British Empire. Alexander Thomson may have been an autodidact who never travelled abroad, but there was nothing narrow or provincial in his thought. His was one of the finest minds of nineteenth century Scotland; he demanded high standards, and he loyally and enthusiastically encouraged a vital local architectural culture.

Yet twentieth century Glasgow has not been kind to Thomson’s legacy. It is not just that his reputation has become overshadowed by that of the second winner of the Alexander Thomson Travelling Studentship, Charles Rennie Mackintosh – for such is the power of fashion. It is rather that many of his best buildings have been wantonly destroyed and that others are suffering through decades of ignorant neglect, while most of his drawings been lost and almost all of his professional papers discarded. Fortunately, we have many of his words to testify to the fact that Thomson was both a great architect and a thinker. In fact, he remains a paradoxical figure: a practical, commercially successful architect and yet something of a visionary. While working away in a busy office in the grid of smoke-blackened stone streets which was the heart of Victorian Glasgow, his mind moved on a different plane and in a different time – seeing the past as if from a distant star, and wandering among the monuments of Ancient Egypt and Classical Greece, inside the columned hall at Karnak and on the summit of the Acropolis. But in architecture, past, present and future are really one: that was the great and eternal truth which Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson wished to impart to his audiences.

Notes

1.  Sam McKinstry, ‘Thomson’s Architectural Theory,’ in Gavin Stamp and Sam McKinstry, eds, ‘Greek’ Thomson, Edinburgh 1994.

2.  In J.E.H. Thomson, D.D., Scholar and Missionary in the Holy Land by William Ewing (London 1925) it is recorded that “the home was broken up, and the survivors found shelter in the house of their brother William. When he removed to London [in 1834] the five remaining, Ebenezer, Alexander, George, and two sisters, took up house together.” The standard work on Thomson is Ronald McFadzean, The Life and Work of Alexander Thomson, London 1979. Further aspects of Thomson’s achievement are discussed in Stamp and McKinstry, op.cit. A complete list of works is given in the book by Gavin Stamp accompanying the exhibition Alexander Thomson: The Unknown Genius held in Glasgow in 1999, and also separately published as Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson, Calmann & King, London 1999

3.  Sam McKinstry, ‘Rowand Anderson and ‘Greek’ Thomson’ in Architectural Heritage IX, The Journal of the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland, Edinburgh 1998, p.40

4.  The catalogue of the library of the Architectural section of the Philosophical Society of Glasgow, which was formerly the library of the Glasgow Architectural Society, to which Thomson contributed and which he probably used, is printed in the Alexander Thomson Society Newsletter, Nº23, February 1999

5.  Graham Law, in his article on Thomson in the Architectural Review, May 1954, suggested that Thomson was particularly influenced by the edition by Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, Bart., Sir Uvedale Price on the Picturesque with an essay on the Origins of Taste and much original matter, Edinburgh & London 1842

6.  see Gavin Stamp, ‘At Once Classic and Picturesque...’, in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 57: 1 March 1998

7.  [the Revd J.E.H. Thomson], Memoir of George Thomson, Cameroon Mountains, West Africa, by one of his nephews, Edinburgh 1881

8.  Undated letter to his nephew, the Revd James Parlane, in the Memoir of George Thomson, op. cit., p.33.

9.  Sam McKinstry, ‘Rowand Anderson and ‘Greek’ Thomson’ in Architectural Heritage IX, 1998, p.40

10.  Michael Hall, ‘What do Victorian churches mean?’ a paper delivered to the Soane Museum Study Group 3rd June 1997, and to whose perceptive analysis of the mid-Victorian intellectual background I am much indebted.

11.  In appreciating the deep influence of D.R. Hay’s writings on Thomson’s thinking, I am beholden to Edward Taylor and his Speculative Investigation into the Sacred and Aesthetic Principles of Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson’s Architecture, a dissertation submitted to the Mackintosh School of Architecture in 1999 [published in The Alexander Thomson Society Newsletter]. Taylor also notes that the articles published in The Builder in the 1850s by the Liverpool architect Samuel Huggins may well have encouraged Thomson's idealisation of the Greek.

12.  Wm(?) Clunas, ‘my impressions and recollections of Greek Thomson’, MS 694 in Thomas Ross’s papers, National Library of Scotland

13.  Speech by the Revd John Stark at the unveiling of the bust by John Mossman, 1877, and recorded by Thomas Gildard among the collection of papers he presented to the Mitchell Library.

14. Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism, 1914. The significance of Thomson’s insistence that Greek architecture was not simply a development of the Egyptian was pointed out to me by David Page, in analysing the facade of Thomson’s Egyptian Halls.

15. Michael Hall, ‘What do Victorian churches mean?’, op.cit.

16. Sam McKinstry, ‘Thomson’s Architectural Theory,’ op.cit., p.64, who points out that ‘shortly after Thomson’s death in 1875, Westcott, the Bishop of Durham, would write that ‘the work of Greece... lives for the simplest Christian in the New Testament’.’ Also see McKinstry, ‘Rowand Anderson and ‘Greek’ Thomson,’ 1998, op. cit., p.37.

17.  Published in the Morning Journal for 17th March 1868 and The Builder 28th March 1868, and discussed by both Brian Edwards and John McKean in Stamp & McKinstry, ‘Greek’ Thomson, op. cit.

18.  Building News 2nd December 1859, p.1078: “In the course of the debate, the Custom-house at Greenock was referred to as an experiment of the system; and the western part of that edifice, which was executed in dry weather, was pronounced to be a particularly satisfactory specimen of the process. A committee was appointed to inquire further into the advantages of this particular mode of induration...”

19.  For Thomson’s work for both the Glasgow Architectural Society and the Glasgow Institute of Architects, see McFadzean, op.cit, chapters 8 & 12. In his bibliography, McFadzean mistakenly cites as a lecture a toast to “‘Architecture, its present state and future prospects,’ proposed in a few telling and suggestive observations by Mr Alexander Thomson” following Thomas Gildard’s presidential address after dinner at the Waverley Hotel in Sauchiehall Street; this was reported in the Evening Citizen for 25th October 1865.

20.  North British Daily Mail 20th December 1859; the Glasgow Herald for 20th December 1859 only provided a note of who spoke.

21.  Lecture to the Glasgow Architectural Society on 30th April 1863, reported in The Builder 9th May 1863, p.337.

22. Sam McKinstry, 1998, op. cit., & Rowand Anderson, ‘The Premier Architect of Scotland’, Edinburgh 1991, p.14. Christie’s lecture was published in the Transactions of the Architectural Institute of Scotland, Session 1853–54.

23. see Gavin Stamp, ‘The Victorian Kirk: Presbyterian architecture in nineteenth-century Scotland’ in Chris Brooks & Andrew Saint, eds., The Victorian Church, Manchester 1995.

24. Nikolaus Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century, Oxford 1972, p.188.

25.  Gavin Stamp, ed, Personal and Professional Recollections by the late Sir George Gilbert Scott, Stamford 1995

26.  Thomas Gildard, “Greek” Thomson, Proceedings of the Philosophical Society of Glasgow, xix, 30th January 1888, pp.1-19, and reprinted in the Alexander Thomson Society Newsletter Nº20, January 1998.

27. quoted in McFadzean, op.cit., p.203

28.  The Annual Report of the Glasgow School of Art and Haldane Academy for 1872 and 1874; Hugh Ferguson, Glasgow School of Art. The History, Glasgow 1995, p.46, who states that Ruskin turned down an invitation to give the Haldane Lectures, but he would seem to be confusing this with Ruskin declining to lecture at the Athenæum, replying, as reported in the Glasgow Herald for 20th May 1874, “I find the desire of audiences to be audiences only, becoming an entirely pestilent character of the age. Everybody wants to hear – nobody to read – nobody to think. To be excited for an hour – and, if possible, amused; to get the knowledge it has cost a man half his life to gather... It is not to be done...” The 1873 Haldane Lectures were given on ‘Artistic Anatomy’ by Prof. Allen Thomson (the man chiefly responsible for Gilbert Scott designing the University buildings) and in 1875 by William Simpson, artist of London.

29. ‘Gossip from Glasgow’, Building News 5th June 1874 p.611.

30. Hugh Ferguson, op. cit. p.46, makes the preposterous claim that Thomson might, in fact, have visited Greece without his wife, children or friends noticing, so that his further reflection that “the content of Thomson’s lectures is uninspiring, and consists of very generalised observations. It is possible that they were tedious even to Victorian ears,” simply tells us more about the author than about his subject.

31. Thomas Gildard, ‘‘Greek’ Thomson, Proceedings of the Philosophical Society of Glasgow, xix, 30th January 1888, pp.1–19, and reprinted in The Alexander Thomson Society Newsletter Nº20, January 1998. A folder of Thomson’s own photographs was given to Glasgow Museums & Art Galleries in 1934 following the death of his son, John Thomson.

32. Reginald Blomfield, “Greek” Thomson, A Critical Note’, Architectural Review, xv, May 1904, p.194.