Christopher Hussey
Encyclopedia
Christopher Edward Clive Hussey (1 October 1899 – 20 March 1970) was one of the chief authorities on British domestic architecture
Architecture
Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...

 of the generation that also included Dorothy Stroud and Sir John Summerson
John Summerson
Sir John Newenham Summerson CH CBE was one of the leading British architectural historians of the 20th century....

.

Career

As a child he lived at Scotney Castle
Scotney Castle
Scotney Castle is an English country house with formal gardens south-east of Lamberhurst in the valley of the River Bewl in Kent, England. It belongs to the National Trust....

, Kent
Kent
Kent is a county in southeast England, and is one of the home counties. It borders East Sussex, Surrey and Greater London and has a defined boundary with Essex in the middle of the Thames Estuary. The ceremonial county boundaries of Kent include the shire county of Kent and the unitary borough of...

 (which he later inherited from his grandfather), not realising until he was a young adult that this was a contrived landscape and environment.

His first major ventures both appeared in 1927. One was a collaboration with his mentor and predecessor at Country Life
Country Life (magazine)
Country Life is a British weekly magazine, based in London at 110 Southwark Street, and owned by IPC Media, a Time Warner subsidiary.- Topics :The magazine covers the pleasures and joys of rural life, as well as the concerns of rural people...

magazine, H. Avray Tipping, in Tipping's series In English Homes, Period IV, vol. 2, The Work of Sir John Vanbrugh and his School, 1699-1736 (1927). English garden history was an unexplored field when Hussey broke ground the same year with The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (1927; reprinted 1967), which was a pioneer in the history of taste that rediscovered from obscurity figures like Richard Payne Knight
Richard Payne Knight
Richard Payne Knight was a classical scholar and connoisseur best known for his theories of picturesque beauty and for his interest in ancient phallic imagery.-Biography:...

, "a Regency prophet of modernism" in Hussey's estimation. Later in Hussey's career, English Gardens and Landscapes 1700-1750 (1967) also covered fresh territory, as a complement to his Georgian volumes English Country Houses.

He is chiefly remembered for the long series of articles he wrote from the 1920s onwards for Country Life (where he became architectural editor), in which he continued the work of his mentor Tipping in setting architectural history in its social history. Based on his accumulated experience in country houses and their muniment rooms, his series of English Country Houses: ECH: Early Georgian, 1715–1760, (1954?; revised, 1965); ECH: Mid-Georgian, 1760–1800 (1956) and ECH: Late Georgian, 1800–1840 (1958) provided an overview of high-style Georgian domestic architecture. 18th-century Georgian houses were widely admired, but at the time of publication Regency houses were not regarded, though a collectors' vogue for early 19th century furniture had spurred Margaret Jourdain
Margaret Jourdain
Margaret Jourdain was a prominent writer on English furniture and decoration. She began her career ghost-writing as Francis Lenygon for the firm of Lenygon & Morant, dealers in furnishings with a royal appointment, who were also the fabricators of carefully crafted reproductions, especially of...

's Regency Furniture (1934). "The surviving houses of the Regency period took on a new lease of life, partly thanks to Country Life authors such as Christopher Hussey who played a significant role in the rediscovery and popularisation of the Regency period" (Sir John Soane's Museum Newsletter 10)

Hussey's series of monographs on selected houses and a series The Colleges of Oxford and Cambridge collected material drawn from his Country Life articles, offered in more permanent format: Petworth House
Petworth House
Petworth House in Petworth, West Sussex, England, is a late 17th-century mansion, rebuilt in 1688 by Charles Seymour, 6th Duke of Somerset, and altered in the 1870s by Anthony Salvin...

, Clarence House
Clarence House
Clarence House is a royal home in London, situated on The Mall, in the City of Westminster. It is attached to St. James's Palace and shares the palace's garden. For nearly 50 years, from 1953 to 2002, it was home to Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, but is since then the official residence of The...

, London, Ely House
Ely House
-Ireland:*Ely Place, Dublin: No. 8 is Ely House, headquarters of the Knights of Saint Columbanus.-United Kingdom:*Ely Place, a gated road at the southern tip of the London Borough of Camden in London, England....

, London, Berkeley Castle
Berkeley Castle
Berkeley Castle is a castle in the town of Berkeley, Gloucestershire, UK . The castle's origins date back to the 11th century and it has been designated by English Heritage as a grade I listed building.The castle has remained within the Berkeley family since they reconstructed it in the...

, Eton College
Eton College
Eton College, often referred to simply as Eton, is a British independent school for boys aged 13 to 18. It was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI as "The King's College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor"....

, Shugborough were all given the Hussey treatment, and they demonstrate the range of his competence. Hussey contributed the chapters on architectural history to H. Clifford Smith, Buckingham Palace: Its Furniture, Decoration & History (1931; reprinted 1937)

He wrote monographs on the conservative contemporary British architect Sir Robert Lorimer
Robert Lorimer
Sir Robert Stodart Lorimer was a prolific Scottish architect noted for his restoration work on historic houses and castles, and for promotion of the Arts and Crafts style.-Early life:...

 (1931) and, more notably, The Life of Sir Edwin Lutyens
Edwin Lutyens
Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens, OM, KCIE, PRA, FRIBA was a British architect who is known for imaginatively adapting traditional architectural styles to the requirements of his era...

, which historian David Watkin
David Watkin (historian)
David John Watkin, MA PhD LittD Hon FRIBA FSA is a British architectural historian. He is an Emeritus Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and Professor Emeritus of History of Architecture in the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge...

 rated "the finest architectural biography" in English. Lutyens' first big London office building was the Country Life Building (1904) in Covent Garden
Covent Garden
Covent Garden is a district in London on the eastern fringes of the West End, between St. Martin's Lane and Drury Lane. It is associated with the former fruit and vegetable market in the central square, now a popular shopping and tourist site, and the Royal Opera House, which is also known as...

, commissioned by the magazine's editor, Edward Hudson. With A.S.G. Butler and George Stewart Hussey contributed to the definitive three-volume Architecture of Sir Edwin Lutyens (1950), the opening shot in the on-going reappraisal of Lutyen's buildings. Nevertheless, Hussey's Country Life articles on contemporary houses are often overlooked.

In the next generation, Hussey's example influenced John Cornforth, with whom he co-wrote the later editions of Hussey's Guide to English Country Houses Open to the Public (first published by Hussey in 1951), and who wrote a series of Country Life articles in 1981 "Continuity and Progress: Christopher Hussey and Modern Architecture" (Country Life, vol. CLXIX, 22 October 1981, pp. 1366–68, etc.) To a lesser extent Hussey's example influenced Mark Girouard
Mark Girouard
Dr Mark Girouard MA, PhD, DipArch, FSA is a British architectural writer, an authority on the country house, leading architectural historian, and biographer of James Stirling.- Family life :...

, whose Life in the English Country House (1979) took a new view, concerned with life downstairs as well as with architects and their patrons among the gentry.

Books

  • In English Homes, Period IV, Volume II, The Work of Sir John Vanbrugh and his School, 1699-1736 (1927) with H. Avray Tipping, Country Life, London.
  • The picturesque: studies in a point of view (1927), London.

Sources

  • John Cornforth, ‘Hussey, Christopher Edward Clive (1899–1970)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004

External links

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