Georgian visions.

JOSEPH GANDY, AN ARCHITECTURAL VISIONARY IN GEORGIAN ENGLAND

By Brian Lukacher. London: Thames & Hudson. 2006. [pounds sterling]40

Most of us know Joseph Michael Gandy (if at all) as John Soane's draughtsman.

Soane was extremely lucky--through Gandy's perspectives, we see Soane's works as the architect wanted them to be seen, from the grand melancholic ruins of the Bank of England to the sunny domestic interiors of Lincoln's Inn Fields. But Gandy did occasionally build on his own account, and he certainly did not confine his amazing graphic talents to showing Soane. His architectural fantasies produced in the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first three of the nineteenth recall the power of paintings and stage sets by Gandy's almost exact contemporary Schinkel. Gandy's command of vertiginous perspective was as awesome as that of John Martin, whose dramatic prints of for instance the Fall of Babylon were immensely popular. But though Gandy's fantasies were regularly shown at the Royal Academy, where they received favourable reviews, they were not engraved, so he never had a popular following nor much money.

Brian Lukacher's book is the first monograph on Gandy and the author explains with trepidation that 'first monographs are an inherently flawed and fragile scholarly medium' because everyone will inevitably be anxious to correct mistakes and exaggerations. He need not be so modest. Doubtless more will be discovered, but Lukacher will remain the Gandy book for many years. Available evidence of the life and work has been thoroughly researched and is well presented by the publisher (though even more colour would have been welcome).

Lukacher rightly calls Gandy 'an architect/artist of the Burkean sublime', that strange and disturbing quality in art and nature that Burke said inspired 'Astonishment--that state of the soul, in which all its emotions are suspended, with some degree of horror'. It has never been more clearly expressed than by Gandy. For instance, his 1805 perspective of Pandemonium, or Part of the High Capital of Satan and His Peers with its endless Neo-Classical arcades, and domes and pyramids belching fire, and sable backdrop of arid mountains conflates the horrors of Milton's Palace of the Rebel Angels with the smoke and flames of the Industrial Revolution (Lukacher tentatively suggests Ledoux's 1804 Cannon Factory at Chaux as a possible source for some of the imagery; surely the influence of Alexander Cozens at Coalbrookdale is there too).

Gandy's own architecture ranged from austere Ledoux-like model designs for agricultural cottages to the spare but fantastic Neo-Classicism of Doric House in Bath that still overlooks Royal Crescent from Sion Hill. Few other buildings remain, for his practice never really took off. Perhaps he lacked the strength of character needed to construct in reality. But, once seen, his drawn work is unforgettable. He was one of the first architectural draughtsmen to understand the potential drama of artificial light enhanced by mirrors and lenses, and one of the last to see the fearsome power of the ancients. Lukacher has rescued a great Romantic imagination from obscurity.