PUGIN, Augustus Welby Northmore.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Autograph letter, with original captioned ink sketch, to Henry Ridgard Bagshawe. A wittily satirical sketch by Pugin, the Roman Catholic architect, sent to his friend Henry Ridgard Bagshawe (1799-1870), a prominent Catholic lawyer. A superb relic of the English Catholic revival, complete with a rare example of the world's first adhesive postage stamp, the Penny Black, which was only in use for a year after its introduction in May 1840.Bagshawe sat on the committee of the Lincoln's Inn Fields district New Church Erection Fund. Lincoln's Inn Fields already had the Sardinian Chapel, well-known as the oldest Roman Catholic chapel in London and restored since the Gordon Riots, but the 1840s was a time of rapid Catholic expansion and new churches were needed. The burning question for Pugin was: should the new church be built in the continental Roman Catholic style, or in the English gothic revival style that Pugin favoured?The sketch shows Bagshawe at his desk at 2 New Square, Lincoln's Inn, dressed in inquisitorial robes, having set aside his lawyer's wig and gown, studying the designs of Vitruvius. On the walls are two "approved" designs for round-domed Catholic churches (one of them St Peter's, Rome), while a picture of the English gothic or "pointed" St Peter's, London (i.e. Westminster Abbey) is partly torn. Around Bagshawe are instruments of torture and a display of condemned books, most of them Pugin's. The sketch is captioned by Pugin, "an old friend with a new face of a Ca

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