The documented recollections of John Brandon Jones and the correspondence of Voysey’s son, Charles Cowles Voysey, have provided insights into Voysey’s design and drawing methods.
Voysey conducted all the design work and the drawing of his watercolour plans, elevations and sections personally.1 In an unpublished letter to The Architects’ Journal on 22 February,
1941,2 C. Cowles Voysey recalled that his father drew and designed with extraordinary speed and assurance, rarely using an eraser (which is quite evident in the drawings in the RIBA Collection), and would produce a set of 1/8inch scale plans, sections and elevations of a house, designed and drawn in 3H pencil and watercoloured, in a weekend.3 Voysey’s drawings from his first days of practice featured a distinctive lettering style of his own design.
Drawings were generally of three types: sheets of plans, elevations and sections, sheets of detail drawings, and perspective sheets, which featured inset plans and were normally mounted on cardboard. Plans and elevations followed a conventional drafting layout, with the floor plans located at the bottom of the sheet and the elevations above. Voysey’s detail sheets were works of art in themselves, with the individual drawings composed and collaged artfully across the sheet.
Almost all of Voysey’s watercolour perspective drawings were prepared by the artist Howard Gaye, with whom Voysey had a long professional relationship, commencing with their first collaboration on Walnut Tree Farm in Castlemorton in 1890 and carrying through to their last on Lodge Style in 1909.
Perspective sheets almost always incorporated inset floor plans – typically integrated into the landscapeandsky background of the illustration – to ensure the drawing was informative as well as attractive. The inset floor plans show Voysey’s inimitable lettering, confirming they would have been prepared jointly between Gaye and Voysey. The dates of the various drawing sheets and entries in Voysey’s ‘white book’ of expenses indicate that the perspective drawings were typically prepared only after at least one design scheme had been presented to the client in plan and elevation only. Following this, by which time Voysey was satisfied the design was set, the perspective would be produced and presented, and working drawings would then generally proceed.
Evidently Voysey placed a high value on his drawings, given his decision to retain them within his office, and eventually arrange for their donation to the RIBA for posterity. In Voysey’s handwriting, on the back of a number of drawings in the RIBA Collection is the note, ‘This drawing must be returned to C.F.A. Voysey Architect’, with his office addresswritten below. His project specifications also contained a standard clause that all drawings were his property, and must be returned to him at the completion of the project.
Allowing for some degree of discolouration over time, the range of colours Voysey used in his watercolour elevations was quite consistent, with little variation in the greygreen slate roofs and only minor disparities in the stone dressings. The reds of the tile roofs, chimney pots and brickonedge detailing were also generally uniform.There appear to be distinct variances from project to project in the greens Voysey would adopt for the guttering, doors and gates. These ranged from bottle and forest greens to much bluer greens and deep teals. Voysey may have wanted to harmonise his individual designs with the prevailing greens of the landscape of the respective context.