GIBBS, JAMES, an architect of considerable eminence in his day, was born about 1674 at Aberdeen, where he was educated and took the degree of Master of Arts at the Marischal College. In his twentieth year he visited Holland, where he entered into the employment of an architect, with whom he continued till 1700, when, by the advice and aided by the asaistauce of his countryman the Earl of Mar, who had himself a taste for architecture, ho proceeded to Italy iu order to Improve himself in his art. Diligtuce he did net lack, and therefore, as far as relates to waking studies, sketches, and memoranda, he may be said to have empluyed his time successfully; yet that he wanted discrimination, and the ability to improve upon his models, is too plainly attested by nearly all his works. After spending ten years iu Italy, during several of which he studied at Rome under an architect named Oarroli, he returned to England, and found his patron, the Earl of Mar, in the ministry. By that nobleman he was recommended to the commissioners for building the fifty new churches, and this eircumatauce opened to him those opportunities which in the opinion of hie admirers ho employed ao worthily. Another ten years how ever elapsed before ho was called upon to make trial of hie ability in any of the metropolitan churches, for his first one, namely, St. 31arthie, was not commenced till 1720-21. In the interim ho erected what is called the new building at King's, College, Cambridge, a design which, with many palpable faults, is not distinguished by originality or any other excellence. If this work is little spoken of (St. Martin's), which was completed in 1726, it has been liberally extolled not only as its author's chef d'ecurre, but as a first-rate piece of architecture, chiefly it would seem as an application of a portico upon a satisfactory scale and at a time when such a feature was by no nieaua so common as it has since become. Certain it is, that, in regard to the exterior at least, few have extended their culogium to any other part of it ; yet for the portico—borrowed from the Pnuthcou at Rome—ho found a model ready prepared to his hands, requiring only to bo adapted to a specific purpose, and if in selecting it he paid a tribute to the classical grandeur of the original, he seems to have looked at it only with the aye of a copyist. Every other feature of the building is at variance with the portico and the order; lumpish, heavy, and uncouth, without even anything of that picturesque richness which sometimes results from exaggerated details and other subordinate forms ; and the lute rior is not at all better. For this church Gibbs submitted two other
designs, which he himself, he tells us, considered preferable to the one executed. They are both given in the folio volume of designs which he published in 1728. Much as those differ from the present building —the body of the church in both of them being circular in its plan (about 95 feet in diameter)—so far from displaying invention, they show, even in the way of alteration, very little more than was abso lutely called for by such chaugo of the general form. The taste manifested in them partakes far mere of Holland, the country where Gibbs made his first sojourn abroad, than of classical Rome. The same remark will apply to his next work, tho church of St. Mary in the Strand, an exceedingly heterogeneous composition, with nothing in its ensemble to reconcile us to its individual solecisms.
In the church of All Saints at Derby, where he added a new body to the old Gothic) tower, be did little more than repeat, with some slight variation, what lie had done for St. Martin's. Ho also built Marylcboue Chapel, the upper part of the steeple of St. Clement's Dance, and St. Bartholomew's HospitaL Ills best work is the Radcliffe Library at Oxford, a rotunda about 140 feet in diameter externally, covered by a dome 105 feet in diameter; for, notwithstanding that the niches and some other parts are the reverse of elegant, and that the building seems very ill adapted to its purpose, there is sonic approach to simplicity in the general mass and its contours, and something of grandeur in the interior. To this library, which was begun in 1737 and completed in about ten years, and the designs for which he published in a separate volume, containing 23 plates, Gibbs made a valuable bequest of books. Ile died August 5th, 1759, and having never been married, left his property, amounting to about 15,000L, to different individuals and public charities, The works of Gibbs certainly do not display either grace or happi ness of invention. They have kr the most part all the heaviness of Vanbrugh's designs, without their other redeeming qualities. They discover neither an innate nor acquired perception of beauty in forms and of harmony in their combination. Nevertheless, in respect of what ho almost accidentally borrowed on one occasion, he is generally spoken of, not as a judicious copier, but as an artist of original mind and unquestionable genius.