| Peter Paul Pugin dilahirkan pada tahun 1851, putera bungsudari pasangan Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin dengan istri ketiga, Jane
Knill. He began practice as the junior partner in Pugin & Pugin. The
senior partner adalah kakak tirinya bernama Edward Welby Pugin, lahoir di London
on 11 March 1834, putra tertua dari A W N Pugin dengan istri kedua Louisa
Burton. Brought up in his father's office, Edward adalah tangan kanan papahnya pada usia enam belas, keeping the practice going
through his father's periodic fits of madness from February 1852
onwards. Ketika ayah mereka meninggal pada tanggal 14 September of that year, Peter Paul
was only one year old, Edward eighteen and Cuthbert Welby (also born to
Louisa) twelve. The sole beneficiary of their father's will was his
widow, Jane Knill; atas nasihat fabrikan stained-glass John
Hardman Powell yang telah menikahi putri tertua Pugin yaitu Anne. Jane Pugin
memindahkan baik rumah maupun perlengkapan kantor ke Birmingham partly to be near their
main patron the 17th Earl of Shrewsbury, but in 1856 the Earl died. The
Pugin family resettled in Gordon Square, London, in the same year
becoming sufficiently prosperous to resume full occupation of the Grange
at Ramsgate pada tahun 1861.
Di tahun 1857, ketika Peter Paul berusia enam tahun, Edward membuka kantor cabang di
Liverpool and formed a partnership with the Irishman James Murray, who
had already been practising their. In 1860 Edward formed a second
partnership with his brother-in-law George Coppinger Ashlin and opened a
Dublin office for Irish work. The Murray partnership was, however,
dissolved in 1860, Murray thereafter practising on his own account until
his early death, and in 1862 Edward merged his practice with that of the
older and well-established Joseph Aloysius Hansom. That partnership
closed acrimoniously in the following year.
Edward Pugin was admitted FRIBA on 16 June 1862. Two years earlier in
1860 he had founded the South East Furniture Company to manufacture his
designs, the management of it being largely in the hands of his brother
Cuthbert. Putusnya jalinan kereja samanya dengan Ashlin di tahun 1869 bisa jadi dikaitkan karena begitu tinmgginya resiko hubungan kerja tersebut, Hotel Granville
di Ramsgate, a vast hotel and hydropathic complex. This failed in
1873 leaving Pugin bankrupt with liabilities of £187,000. He left for
the United States where he quickly obtained commissions for some thirty
churches and a monastery in Cuba. The English and Scottish work in hand
was continued by Cuthbert and Peter Paul, who had been assisting him
since the 1860s and had recently been taken into partnership, the
practice becoming Pugin & Pugin.
Edward Pugin mendadak meninggal dunia pada 5 Jun1 1875 akibat kelelahan kerja dan penggunaan yang kurang tepat dari chloral hydrate'. Dia belum menikah and the main
responsibility for the practice passed to Peter Paul, Cuthbert being
principally concerned with the furniture making and furnishing side of
the family business. Although Peter Paul's offices remained in London
and Liverpool his practice was largely Scottish through Charles Eyre.
Eyre came of a landed Northumbrian family and had been a parish priest
at Pugin's church at Newcastle; Stephen Eyre, one of Edward Pugin's
clerk of works, was probably a relative. Charles Eyre was appointed
administrator of the Catholic church in the Glasgow area from 1869 and
Archbishop of Glasgow when the Catholic hierarchy was re-created in
1878. Although Peter Paul's earlier churches were strongly influenced by
his father and brother, by the 1880s he had developed a very
recognisable curvilinear Gothic style, usually in red sandstone with
elaborate altarpieces dalam marbel-marbel berwarna.
Peter Paul Pugin menikah dengan puteri ketiga dari pendiri Katholik
John Bird dari Hammersmith pada tahun 1886. Mereka dikaruniai lima orang anak, but none
entered the practice. Peter Paul died in March 1904, the firm being
continued by his nephew Sebastian Pugin Powell, born in 1886, the son of
John Hardman Powell. He became a member of the firm in 1884, tetapi tidaklah jelas apakah pada tanggal itu ia menjadi rekan kerja.
Cuthbert lived on in retirement at Ramsgate until March 1928.
Sebastian Pugin Powell died in 1949, but the practice was continued by
his cousin Charles Henry Cuthbert Powell, born 1874, until his death in
1958. |
