Château de Thery

H. W. Brewer

c. 1880

Signed with initials lower right. (Oddly enough, the initials seem to be backwards.)

Source: Stevenson’s House Architecture, I, 239

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“Tall pyramidal slate roofs are found chiefly in chateaux and mansions in the country ; sometimes also in town houses. They are a legacy from the later Gothic style of the country, which it retains to the present day. It will be remembered that in attempting to give a rationale of Gothic architecture, I showed that, while in England the pointed arch bad in later Gothic become flattened, and the roofs had been made flat in harmony with it, in France pointed vaulting and pointed windows having been retained, high steep roofs have been retained also. ” [continued below]

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Commentary by J. J. Stevenson

This habit no doubt, encouraged by the quarries of beautiful slates which almost every province of France possessed, durable and thin, capable of being cut into any forms or worked into any curves or angles and, when laid, forming a beautifully even surface. The excellence of the material led the builders to take a pride in their roofs and to make the most of them, and to prefer slate roofs to gables, sometimes even in their churches. In the treatment of the roofs lies the chief charm of the pretty little Gothic Chateau de Thery, which is here illustrated. It will be seen from this illus- tration that these sloping or 'hipped' roofs, as they are technically called, are better suited than gables to the round and octagonal towers and to the machicolations the para- pets projected on corbels, which we see here, leaving openings for throwing stones and molten lead down on besiegers of mediaeval military architecture. In many French buildings (e.g. the new building of the Louvre) these pyramidal roofs are truncated so as to form a square plat- form on the top surrounded by an ornamental railing. Sometimes they terminated in a form like a chisel edge as in the entrance tower of Jacques Coeur's house at Bourges [link].

These tall roofs have lately become very fashionable in England, partly because they express the Gothic tendency to height, with which most of the architects are imbued ; no doubt also, because they give a good deal of show for the money. All about London now they break up the modest roof-lines of the older architecture.” [I, 239-40].

Bibliography

Stevenson, J. J. House Architecture. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1880.

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Last modified 22 July 2017