William Burges - Early Life and Travels

Early Life and Travels

Burges was born on 2 December 1827, the son of Alfred Burges (1796–1886), a wealthy civil engineer. Alfred made a considerable fortune, some £113,000 (£9,126,996 in 2012 adjusted for inflation) at his death, enabling his son to devote his life to the study and practice of architecture without requiring that he actually earn a living.

Burges entered King's College School, London, in 1839 to study engineering, his contemporaries there including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Michael Rossetti. He left in 1844 to join the office of Edward Blore, surveyor to Westminster Abbey. Blore was an established architect, having worked for both William IV and Queen Victoria, and had made his reputation as a proponent of the Gothic Revival. In 1848 or 1849, Burges moved to the offices of Matthew Digby Wyatt. Wyatt was as prominent an architect as Blore, evidenced by his leading role in the direction of the Great Exhibition in 1851. Burges's work with Wyatt, particularly on the Medieval Court for this exhibition, was influential on the subsequent course of his career. During this period, he also worked on drawings of medieval metalwork for Wyatt's book, Metalwork, published in 1852, and assisted Henry Clutton with illustrations for his works.

Of equal importance to Burges's subsequent career was his travelling. Burges believed that all architects should travel, remarking that it was "absolutely necessary to see how various art problems have been resolved in different ages by different men." Enabled by his private income, Burges moved through England, then France, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Italy, Greece and finally into Turkey. In total, he spent some 18 months abroad developing his skills and knowledge by sketching and drawing. What he saw and drew provided a repository of influences and ideas that he used and re-used for the whole of his career. Although he never went beyond Turkey, the art and architecture of the East, both Near and Far, had a significant impact on him; his fascination with Moorish design finding ultimate expression in the Arab Room at Cardiff Castle, and his study of Japanese techniques influencing his later metalwork. Burges received his first important commission at the age of 35, but his subsequent career did not see the development that might have been expected. His style had already been formed over the previous twenty years of study, thinking and travelling. J. Mordaunt Crook, the foremost authority on Burges, writes that, "once established, after twenty years' preparation, his 'design language' had merely to be applied, and he applied and re-applied the same vocabulary with increasing subtlety and gusto."