Richard Popplewell Pullan was an architect and brother-in-law of

William Burges William Burges (; 2 December 1827 – 20 April 1881) was an English architect and designer. Among the greatest of the Victorian art-architects, he sought in his work to escape from both nineteenth-century industrialisation and the Neoc ...

. He is known for his work in archaeology including the discovery of the

Lion of Knidos The Lion of Knidos is the name for a colossal ancient Greek statue erected near the ancient port of Knidos, south-west Asia Minor (now near Datça in Turkey). Although there is some debate about the age of the sculpture, in general, scholarly opin ...

Life

Pullan was born at Knaresborough on 27 March 1825. He was articled to Richard Lane in Manchester and in 1853 he worked with Sir

Matthew Digby Wyatt Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt (28 July 1820 – 21 May 1877) was a British architect and art historian who became Secretary of the Great Exhibition, Surveyor of the East India Company and the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Camb ...

on the Medieval court at the Great Exhibition. In 1855, he was placed second in the competition for Lille Cathedral, a competition Burges also entered. Knidis monument pullan

The

was found in 1858 by Pullan as he walked the cliffs near where he was helping Charles Thomas Newton to excavate the ancient Greek city of

Knidos Knidos or Cnidus (; grc-gre, Κνίδος, , , Knídos) was a Greek city in ancient Caria and part of the Dorian Hexapolis, in south-western Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey. It was situated on the Datça peninsula, which forms the southern side ...

.British Museum Collectio
The Lion of Knidos
British Museum, retrieved 30 November 2013 Royal Engineer

Robert Murdoch Smith Major General Sir Robert Murdoch Smith KCMG FRSE (18 August 1835 – 3 July 1900) was a Scottish engineer, archaeologist and diplomat. He is known for his involvement with the excavation of antiquities found at Knidos and Cyrene, the telegraph ...

was given the task of assisting. He was presented with the lion statue that had fallen onto its front face. The limestone core of the monument was still there but the marble cladding and other details had either been stolen or lay around where it had fallen. Smith was able to replace and move each of the remaining stones which allowed the engineer to write a detailed report on the structure. Pullan created an orthographic drawing of the building. It is thought to be a good reproduction of what the whole structure would have looked like. The Lion of Knidos was loaded onto the naval ship ''

HMS Supply Nine ships of the Royal Navy have been named HMS ''Supply''. * was a 6-gun fireship purchased in 1672 and expended in 1673. * was a 9-gun fireship purchased in 1688. Her fate is unknown. * was a 4-gun hoy launched in 1725 and captured in 175 ...

'' and shipped to London. It is now in the

British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...

. In 1859 he married

's sister, Mary. Pullan had an office at 15 Clifford's Inn London and entered many of the major competitions of the later Victorian period, without success. He earned a living by lecturing and authoring, writing a number of books on his travels in the Middle East and on architecture, including ''Elementary lectures on Christian architecture''. On Burges's' death in 1881 the Pullans inherited

The Tower House The Tower House, 29 Melbury Road, is a late-Victorian townhouse in the Holland Park district of Kensington and Chelsea, London, built by the architect and designer William Burges as his home. Designed between 1875 and 1881, in the French Go ...

in Kensington, Burges's own home. In the following years, Pullan worked with a number of Burges's team, including John Starling Chapple and William Frame to complete some of Burges's unfinished works, including Cardiff Castle and

Castell Coch (; ) is a 19th-century Gothic Revival castle built above the village of in South Wales. The first castle on the site was built by the Normans after 1081 to protect the newly conquered town of Cardiff and control the route along the Taff G ...

, the fantasy palaces Burges had begun for John Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute. Pullan also authored two studies of Burges's work, ''The House of W. Burges, A.R.A.'', in 1886 and ''Architectural Designs of W. Burges'', in 1887. Pullan died at Brighton on 30 April 1888.

Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pullan, Richard Popplewell 1825 births 1888 deaths People from Knaresborough English archaeologists English travel writers 19th-century English architects Architects from Yorkshire