Architect. Son of the painter, Charles Lutyens, he was educated at the Royal College of Art (1885–87). His early career was marked by a series of commissions for country houses, many of them obtained through Gertrude Jekyll, for whom he built Munstead Wood, Surrey (1896). His early works are in a picturesque vernacular style. The characteristic style of the middle period of his career was a simplified version of Queen Anne, relying on fine proportions and mouldings, as at Middlefield, Cambridgeshire (1908). Progressively however Lutyens moved in the direction of a monumental classicism, albeit one increasingly abstracted and stripped of academic detail. His magnum opus was the work done for the New Delhi planning commission which he accepted in 1912, and for which he designed the Viceroy’s House, probably the single most significant monument of the Raj. Here, stripped classicism is combined with Indian craft detail. During the 1920s, he designed the Cenotaph and more than 50 other war memorials. From 1926 onwards, he collaborated on many large blocks of flats, including his Westminster housing scheme (1928–30). Other works from this period include the British Embassy in Washington (1926–29) and Campion Hall, Oxford (1934). His most ambitious project of the 1930s was the design for Liverpool’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, of which only the crypt was actually built. Lutyens was elected ARA in 1913), RA in 1920, and President of the Royal Academy in 1938. He received a gold medal for architecture from the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1921, becoming the organisation’s Vice-President in 1924.
Bibliography (updated 2024): T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, pp. 56, 331–32; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Leicestershire and Rutland, Liverpool, 2000, pp. xvi, 322, 340; R. Cocke, Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk, Liverpool, 2013, pp. 25–27; C. Hussey, The Life of Sir Edwin Lutyens, London, 1950; G.T. Noszlopy, Public Sculpture of Warwickshire, Coventry & Solihull, Liverpool, 2003, pp. 124–25, 261, 267; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, pp. 75–76, 105–06; G. Stamp, ‘Lutyens, Sir Edwin Landseer (1869–1944)’, ODNB (online edn), (2004), 2012; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. xxxviii, 70–72, 95, 98, 99, 254–55, 270, 300–04, 307, 357, 361–62, 405–09, 416–19; T. Wyke, Public Sculpture of Greater Manchester, Liverpool, 2004, pp. 7, 130–33, 173, 236, 239, 306–07, 323–25, 452.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011