McNed

Gillian Darley

• The Architect and His Wife: A Life of Edwin Lutyens by Jane Ridley
  Chatto, 524 pp, £25.00, June 2002, ISBN 0 7011 7201 0
• Edwin Lutyens, Country Houses: From the Archives of ‘Country Life’ by Gavin Stamp
  Aurum, 192 pp, £35.00, May 2001, ISBN 1 85410 763 1
• Lutyens Abroad edited by Andrew Hopkins and Gavin Stamp
  British School at Rome, 260 pp, £34.95, March 2002, ISBN 0 904152 37 5

Sir Edwin (Ned) Landseer Lutyens, architect of genius, was a master of the false trail and the misleading, if jocular, aside. Born and educated in London, he preferred to dwell on his formative years in rural Surrey. Although trained in the architectural office of Ernest George and Harold Peto, the older of whom was an able vernacular revivalist and the younger a skilled landscape architect, he portrayed himself as a self-taught artist who learned what he needed by haunting the yards of traditional craftsmen builders. Eventually, he all but scratched his family from the record – especially his curious father, a military horse painter turned landscapist whose later years were blackened by his obsessive secret, a mysterious Venetian paint recipe, never revealed. When Emily Lytton first met her future husband, she assumed him to be the only child of a widow. In reality he was the tenth surviving child, the ninth son, of a family of 13, happy to have become his mother’s favourite son after recovering from rheumatic fever.