Recycling Ruins

In 1768, William Aislabie purchased an estate neighbouring his own that included the ruins of Fountains Abbey, and proceeded to clear and reorganise the ruins to emphasise them as the subject of a Picturesque view. His intervention resulted in significant critical objection, but the basis of this objection shifted substantially over the ensuing decades. In the 1770s, William Gilpin's objections were founded in ideas of the ‘authentic’ Gothic ruin, a late-eighteenth-century concept based on the building's Picturesque qualities and evocation of mood; in the 1840s, John Walbran's criticism was based on a new concept of ruins derived from empirical examination that valued the original fabric of the building as documentary evidence. The changing concept of ruins exemplifies the shift in the perception of the Gothic, as antiquarian investigation transformed it from a fashionable, private mode of building that was perceived as irrational and disorderly to a principled, moral and public style

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