Abstract
This essay investigates the pictorial practices used by Edmund Sharpe (1809–77) to visualize the evolution of English Gothic architecture. Examining his 1849 Treatise on the Rise and Progress of the Decorated Window Tracery in England, this essay emphasizes Sharpe’s singular approach to classifying architecture within the framework of debates about evolutionary descent in studies of natural and architectural history. This essay positions Sharpe’s Treatise in relation to works by naturalists such as Carl Linnaeus and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and alongside histories of medieval architecture by Thomas Rickman, Robert Willis, and Edward Augustus Freeman, to name a few. These examples help contextualize Sharpe’s new classification of English Gothic architecture within the context of images showing evolutionary descent and the typical in species.
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