TRUE PRINCIPLES vol.2 no.1

1) Forget the Millennium, the Society is looking towards 2002

Chairman Nick Dermott reports

2) Michael Trappes-Lomax

Anthony Symondson SJ writes evocatively about a likeable and idiosyncratic personality and his excellent, but perhaps too little read, biography of A.W.Pugin.

Anthony Symondson SJ

3) In the Shadow of Fonthill — Pugin's Early Years at Alton Towers

Is it possible that Pugin could have been influenced at the Towers by 'the villain Wyatt', as he refers to him?

Michael Fisher investigates

4) Some Stray Notes on Art

John Hardman Powell, 1827-1895, is known to many Pugin enthusiasts and scholars both for his apprenticeship, as it were, to A. W.N.Pugin, and for the fact that he married Pugin's daughter, Anne, in 1850. His affectionate and sympathetic portrayal of A.W.N.P., to whom he always acknowledged his great debt — 'Pugin in his home ' — has also become familiar to many. Less often discovered is Some Stray Notes on Art, published in 1889, his lectures to students at the Birmingham School of Art. Powell became chief designer for Hardman & Co in Birmingham after Pugin's death in 1852, producing, over a considerable period of time, beautiful stained glass, jewellery and metalwork; he therefore would have had much of value to impart to students. Whilst he had securely ingested all that his master had taught him, he gradually evolved an approach of his own to design, lighter and more attenuated than that of Pugin perhaps; in a sense less 'masculine', but attractively graceful and flowing.

In his writing, Powell talks to us very directly, and with a certain artlessness, if we may use that word in this context, which has a charm all its own; we have therefore reproduced the first lecture 'Art Practical', verbatim, despite one or two comments in it which may seem unexpected in today's climate, and with its own rather startling paragraphing and punctuation. It is most interesting to note Pugin's influence on him — the Revival itself, truth to materials, honesty of structure, the use of symbolism in craft, or 'Conventionality' as Powell calls it, and, in particular, the structure of the medieval English parish church — all these and more are covered. There is much food for thought. Are there not also, perhaps, undertones of Ruskin here too?

John Hardman Powell

5) The Bergh Memorial Library

Father John Seddon OSB records the development of the library at St Augustine's Monastery, Ramsgate.

Father John Seddon OSB

6) Society Sorties

Pugin Pastoral 2000

Michael Blaker recalls our trip to the Shires

Millennium Sketching Day: a Society Sortie

'Of the thousands upon thousands of sketches in pencil, ink, sepia and colour, from Churches and their "treasures", boats, landscapes, etc, there is not one has not the truth value of a Photograph with the art glamour of the man added.' John Hardman Powell, on Pugin's watercolours and drawings, in: 'Pugin in his home', 1889.

Catriona Blaker