Middleton’s Architectural Odysseys

a trained observer, with a keen and sympathetic eye, and an unusual power of lucid exposition" The Academy , No. 1259, June 20 1896.

John Henry Middleton (1846-1896), during his half century of an abundantly creative life, was architect, archaeologist, art historian, author and art director. He assiduously developed an encyclopaedic knowledge of the architectural traditions of Antiquity alongside empirical experience of their ruins through extensive travels.

An undergraduate at Exeter College, University of Oxford, Middleton began his varied career under the tutelage of architect George Gilbert Scott and then in the architectural practice of his own father, John Middleton (d. 1885). Elected to the RIBA in 1875, he became secretary to his friend William Morris’ newly founded Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. He established an ongoing connection with the University of Cambridge upon being appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art (1886), a fellow of King’s College (1888) and Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum (1889). In 1892 he undertook the challenging new post of Director of Art at the South Kensington Museum, London (renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1899).

Three years after Middleton’s untimely death from opiate addiction in 1896, his widow Bella (née Stillman, 1868-1948) donated the notebooks featured here to the Fitzwilliam Museum, for the benefit of students. Middleton had spent time as a child in Italy and married Bella, an expatriate American born in Crete who moved in pre-Raphaelite circles, in Rome in December 1892. He published two authoritative tomes on the topography and monuments of ancient Rome in 1885 and 1888, republished as The Remains of Ancient Rome in 1892. In the early spring of this same pivotal year, Middleton travelled to Greece for three months to initiate detailed studies for a companion volume on ancient Athens.

Professor Ernest Gardner (1862-1939), formerly Director of the British School at Athens (BSA) and subsequently Yale Professor of Art and Archaeology at University College London, was tasked by the Society of the Promotion of Hellenic Studies to prepare the material in these seven notebooks for posthumous publication (Gardner, E. A., Middleton, J. H., Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies. Supplementary Papers: Plans and Drawings of Athenian Buildings . London, 1900). Middleton's measured drawings and plans were revised in 1899 by Thomas D. Atkinson, the architect then in residence at the BSA. Gardner's footnotes to the published volume detail the topographical underpinnings of Middleton's drawings, particularly Penrose’s Principles of Athenian Architecture (1851), given further nuance by Middleton from his personal observations on the ground in Athens.

In addition to architectural drawings of iconic buildings and epigraphy on the Athenian acropolis and its environs, Middleton made excursions further afield in Greece, Italy and beyond to Asia Minor and Egypt. En route, he dashed off impressionistic word-and-drawing images [ GBR/3437/JHMN/1/3/27 ], conjuring a broad vista with a felucca drifting up the Nile [ GBR/3437/JHMN/1/1/51 ], a detailed close-up of a cotton plant bloom [ GBR/3437/JHMN/1/1/49 ] or the shade of blue in the bay at Munychia (Mουνυχία), Piraeus [ GBR/3437/JHMN/1/4/93 ]. These very personal aides-memoires were never published. They offer glimpses of delighted sensory encounter with the natural environments of mountain, sky and sea, that unfolded alongside cerebral observation and careful record of man-made monuments.

The Faculty of Classics is grateful to Dr Greg Reynolds and his wife Dr Dagmar Reynolds for their family’s generous financial gift which enabled the digitisation of these notebooks in loving memory of their aunt, Professor Joyce M. Reynolds (1918-2022).