Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

influential on a far greater scale. His method was immediately seen as innovative and as J
H Parker (1806-84) the Oxford publisher recalled it was Willis who ‘first brought the
system into such thorough order, that it became quite undeniable to any educated person
who takes the trouble to follow his steps and examine the evidence’. 202 Rickman was not
an educated person. He had, as Parker admitted, pointed the way but he was ‘not a
learned man, not well acquainted with history, or the use of records. Willis… made
architectural history complete, thorough and undeniable’. 203
As this suggests Willis’s dominance was not unconnected with a sense of his
social as much as his intellectual superiority to most of his predecessors and
contemporaries in the field, but it would be unjust to suggest that it was not mostly
attributable to his brilliance, the concentrated focus of a trained mind and the ability to
organise and communicate his findings that he brought to the subject. Willis himself was
respectful in his writings of Britton and Milner, even when he disagreed with them and
used Pugin and Willson’s Specimens for his own studies. Nevertheless he represented a
new generation in antiquarianism and a new approach that would in time eclipse the old.
From 1835, when he published Remarks on the Architecture of the Middle Ages,
Especially of Italy, which drew attention to the important but neglected Italian gothic,
Willis had been a respected author on the subject. After 1837, when a legacy gave him
financial independence, his interest in Gothic architecture developed, manifested in one
or two built projects, including the cemetery chapel at Wisbech and in his paper On the
Construction of the Vaults of the Middle Ages, read to the Institute of British Architects,
of which he was a fellow, in 1841 and published the following year. Significantly Willis
was never a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and probably never considered
becoming one.
It was in 1844, with the foundation of the British Archaeological Association and
the delivery of the first of the series of lectures on the history of individual cathedrals to
202
Quoted in Buchanan, ‘Robert Willis and the Rise of Architectural History’, with no source, p.160.
203
Quoted in Buchanan, ‘Robert Willis and the Rise of Architectural History’, p.161.
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