File 3 - Student Prize and Competition Drawings of P.E. Nobbs

“In 1900, the year in which he completed his apprenticeship, Nobbs passed his examination for associate membership in the Royal Institute of British Architects (R.I.B.A.) and won the Institute’s Tite Prize for a design for an isolated clock tower, a work in the then highly fashionable neo-Baroque mode. In the fall of the same year, he embarked on a six-month trip to the Continent, the Tite Prize enabling him to study the architecture and decoration of Northern Italy. Together with another young Edinburgh architect, Ramsay Traquair, who was to succeed him as Macdonald Professor of Architecture at McGill, Nobbs visited Milan, Verona, Venice, Ravenna and Florence – an itinerary made almost obligatory by the publications of John Ruskin and G.E. Street. Watercolour sketches of Italian marble and mosaic work from this trip helped him to win a second major prize awarded by the R.I.B.A.: the 1902 Owen Jones Studentship for a scheme for the mosaic decoration of a church.” (Susan Wagg, Percy Erskine Nobbs: Architect, Artist, Craftsman [Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1982], 2-3.)