James Gibbs

James Gibbs 1682-1754, English architect, b. Scotland, studied in Rome under Carlo Fontana. Returning to England in 1709, he was appointed a member of the commission authorized to build 50 churches in London. Only 10 of these were completed; they include two of Gibbs's most distinguished works, St. Mary-le-Strand (1714-17) and St. Martin-in-the-Fields (1721-26); the latter formed a basic inspiration for many of the steepled churches of the colonial period in America. Gibbs did considerable work for the universities, including the circular Radcliffe Camera at Oxford (1739-49), considered his finest design, and the Senate House at Cambridge, where from 1722 onward he was constantly employed. He designed also many town and country houses. His works have the distinction characteristic of the Georgian period and of the work of Sir Christopher Wren, by whom he was chiefly influenced. He wrote a Book of Architecture (1728, repr. 1968) and Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of Architecture (1732).

Bibliography: See study by B. Little (1955).

Gibbs, James (1682–1754) Scottish architect who was inspired by Sir Christopher Wren. Gibbs was an individualist, fitting neither into the Baroque style, which preceded him, nor the later Palladian. His best-known work is the church of St Martin in the Fields, London (1722–26).

Gibbs, James (1682–1754). As an architect Gibbs was unusual for his time, not because he was Scottish-born or even because he was Roman catholic, but because he spent six years in Rome and studied under Carlo Fontana (1703–9). Although Gibbs shared with the Palladians an admiration for Palladio, his thought was unblushingly baroque. He was predictably patronized by Tory magnates, but his own Toryism did not preclude him from a governorship of St Bartholomew's hospital (1723), for which he planned a rebuild; in 1728 the Whig duke of Argyll accepted Gibbs's dedication of his Book of Architecture. Appointed as surveyor for the ‘50 new churches’ legislated for London in 1711, Gibbs built St Mary-le-Strand (1714), but he lost the ‘political’ surveyorship in 1715. It appears to have been through his sheer professional competence that he was appointed architect for the unbaroque St Martin-in-the-Fields (1722–6). Probably his best-known secular building is Oxford's Radcliffe library, the ‘Camera’, completed 1748; at Cambridge, he built the Senate House and Gibbs's Building at King's.

David Denis Aldridge