ORDINARY MEETING OF FELLOWS LECTURE

Grecian Doric’s return to the Central Mediterranean: Col.(later General Sir) George Whitmore’s contribution with the Royal Engineers to the civil architecture of British Malta and the Ionian Islands in the early 19th. century

by Dr David M. Boswell, D.Phil, Hon. D. Litt.(Malta), FSA

As well as updating the fortifications left by the Knights of St. John and the Venetians, different forms of civil architectural development were required by the British in Malta from 1800 and the Ionian Islands from 1814. Until the 1830s both relied on the commander of the Royal Engineers from 1812-1829, Col. George Whitmore with his British REs and a small staff of local artificers and sculptors. Trained in drawing by Paul Sandby at the RMA in Woolwich, Whitmore (1775 -1862) took his models from the plates of the books on Ancient Athens by Stuart and Revett and others, published by the Dilettanti Society, which he obtained for the Garrison Library. For 27 years he designed a series of Grecian neoclassical porticoes, monuments and the naval hospital in Malta, and remodelled the interior of the Grand Master’s Palace and the Governor’s summer residence at San Anton. In Corfu this included the great Palace for the High Commissioner and parliament, a monumental cistern on the Esplanade, and probably the basic designs for the HC’s villa Mon Repos. Other REs designed similarly Grecian markets, schools and law courts, notably in Cephalonia. In both British territories they provided the opportunity for collaboration with local sculptors and painters and the development of their own schools of art. Initially influenced by their teachers’ experience at the Academia di San Luca in Rome and the studios of Canova and Thorwaldsen, they were offered casts of the Parthenon frieze from the British Museum in the 1820s and teaching material from South Kensington after 1851.

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