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The passing of time tends to mellow architecture, so that buildings that might once have seemed startlingly new or original appear politely respectful to us today. We are no longer shocked, for instance, to see a Palladian building next to a gothic one or an exuberant Victorian extension to an elegantly proportioned Georgian house.
The work of the Victorian architect George Devey (1820-86; Fig. 2) is interesting in relation to this process because extreme shifts in style often occur within individual buildings that he designed. His large, rambling country houses have the appearance of historical collages, mash-ups that seem to belie any precise chronology.
Devey was a highly successful architect, mainly of country houses, but his reputation waned after his death and some of his projects remained obscure for many years. Jill Allibone's biography, published in 1991, is still the only proper study of his work. Devey's relative anonymity can be only partly explained by the passing of time and the cycles of architectural fashion. The nature of his work and the degree to which it sometimes blurred questions of historical provenance actively contributed too. In some ways, he was almost too successful in his integration of historic fragments and new elements, successfully writing his own work into at least partial obscurity.
Devey's career took a long time to get going. Born in 1820, he initially trained as a watercolourist specialising in rural architectural scenes. In 1837 he became a pupil of Thomas Little, a middling architect of church buildings. Devey stayed with Little for nine years - an unusually long time for such a modest position - before setting up on his own. He then spent much of his early practice engaged in minor restoration and improvement projects. When he began to work on...