Note 261 — CHAPTER 12 NORMAN SHAW AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

Many serious and conscientious English students of this period would precede such a list with the name of George Devey (1820-86). Of Devey, in whose office C. F. A. Voysey, the most original English architect of the next generation, chose to work after completing his apprenticeship with Seddon, Voysey later wrote: ‘Providentially an invitation came to enter the Office of the most extensive practitioner in homes for the Nobility and Gentry. No domestic practice has equalled his in extent before or since his death.’ As in the case of William Burn, whose aristocratic practice of the forties and fifties Devey’s more than rivalled in the sixties and seventies, neither he nor his clients cared for publicity, and so none of his work was published, even to the slight extent that the work of Nesfield and Webb was illustrated in the professional journals. Still today his houses are known to posterity chiefly through a few articles: Godfrey, Walter ‘The Work of George Devey’, Architectural Review, XXI (1907), 23-30, 83-8, 293-306; and ‘George Devey, F.R.I.B.A., a Biographical Essay’, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, XIII (1906), 501-25.

But just as the work of Nesfield and Webb was in actuality familiar from the first to their professional friends and rivals, as also to prospective country house clients, so was that of Devey. Many of the stylistic trends so vigorously exploited by Shaw in the seventies can be traced back to Devey’s houses of the preceding decade—or so such experts on the period as H. S. Goodhart-Rendel and John Brandon-Jones, who know Devey’s work intimately, always insist. Foreign students of this period, from Muthesius to the Editor of this series and this author, perhaps merely because of lack of direct or even adequate indirect knowledge of Devey’s houses, have never been ready to grant him so important a place in the story. Here particularly, where the story is told in an international context, the evident strength of the influence of Shaw’s work abroad even more than at home justifies giving his primacy and referring only incidentally to that of Devey.