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.

LRB 17 April 2003 | PDF Download