the catalogue

George III, design for a small palace, engraved by J J Kirby (Cat.22)

notes
This catalogue section has been compiled by John Harris who is grateful for contributions by Dr Iain Gordon
Brown on Andrew Fletcher; Gareth Williams on Lady Wilbraham and Dr Rosemary Hill on Sarah Losh.
He also wishes to thank Charles Hind for making available material relating to a number of the architects
featured in this catalogue and exhibition.
The author wishes to pay tribute to Sir Howard Colvin’s A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600–1840
in its third, 1995, edition (to be superseded this year by the 4th edition). His entries have been the mainstay of
this catalogue section, and indeed compensate for long bibliographical lists.

All measurements are given in millimetres, height before width.

early amateurs corresponded to that of the ‘Specification’. It might have been
conceived as one of the ‘Roman’ loggias along the Thames as part of
his plan for a neo-Augustan London built of stone rather than wood,
Sir John Osborne (c.1550–1628) and the Salisbury and in anticipation of the King’s visit to Salisbury House in 1608.
House Porticus The ‘Specification’ has long tantalized historians, for no design
existed to match it – until 2005 when Joseph Friedman discovered
1 John Osborne the drawing, exhibited here for the first time, in a portfolio of mainly
late 18th-century development plans for the Cecil’s Millbank estates.
The Salisbury House Porticus, 1610
Reunited with its specification, it is now possible to claim that here
Pen & ink (430 x 1716) is the most important architectural design of the whole Elizabethan
The Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House
and Jacobean age, a manifestation of pure Vitruvian classicism at a
Although this catalogue and exhibition does not deal with the time when Inigo Jones was still adolescent in architecture.
Elizabethan patron as contributing to architectural design, because The project based upon the drawing and the specification has
Sir John Osborne so perfectly fulfills the criteria for an Elizabethan been reconstructed on paper by Manolo Guerci as a two-storeyed
gentleman architect, he is represented here. loggia, on plan 70 feet in length by 12 feet 6 inches in width, its peri-
In the National Archives is a text that has long intrigued scholars. style of sixteen by four Corinthian columns supporting an ‘upper
Its modern title is Specification of a Plan by ‘Mr Osborne’ for making a walke’ for a promenade with views to both river and house.
‘Porticus’ at the South End of the Earl of Salisbury’s Garden, September 1610. Surrounding this walk were not conventional balustrades, but
It opens with ‘Osborne’s’ words: ‘The purpose is to make a Porticus ‘fifty ballisters [rather like fluted pilasters] to runne in lenghte with
at the South end of my L. of Salisburyes garden in the Strand run- fifty globes upon them’, each surmounted by a bird with folded
ning in lengthe East and West and standing in bredth North and wings described as a ‘Halcyon’ bearing a twig with a leaf in its
South’, and so this description continues for more than 2,000 beak. The short sides of the ‘walke’ facing outwards were formed
words, written most intelligently by one who possessed a thorough as pedimented superimposed porticoes, the whole cleverly worked
knowledge of architecture, in particular of Vitruvian theory, and out from Vitruvius, Serlio and Palladio, as well as Vredeman de
construction. The writer was certainly neither a common artificer Vries’s Architectura oder Bauung der Antiquen aus dem Vitruvius, 1577.
nor a more educated Simon Basil, who was surveyor to Salisbury The upshot of this discovery was the recognition that the
House. The parameters when this Porticus could have been built are ‘Osborne’ of the Porticus must be the designer of the Haynes Grange
between 1605 and 1610, when the width of Lord Salisbury’s garden Room in the Victoria and Albert Museum, for that too was based

26
2

27
upon Serlio and the Corinthian order, and on its ceiling were This design made by Pratt for Sir Ralph Bankes shows the principal
flying birds of the ‘Halycon’ sort recommended for the ceiling of front of Kingston Lacy in Dorset as executed. The distinctive Pratt
the Porticus. The room was installed at Haynes Grange either in features include prominent chimneys, balustraded roof and cupola.
1754, or perhaps even earlier, when Haynes was a hunting park for
Chicksands Priory, the seat of the Osborne family, a connection
made by Mark Girouard, enabling us to conclude that the room was
3–5 Sir Roger Pratt
made up of material salvaged from the demolished Pigeon Gallery at Architectural notebooks
Chicksands, which was described as having pigeons painted on the Insc: ‘Sir Roger Pratt / architects memoranda / 1657 … Ryston Hall,
ceiling. The Osborne of the Specification is obviously the Sir John Downham, Norfolk’
Osborne who succeeded to Chicksands in 1592. He had graduated Insc: ‘SIR ROGER PRATT. / notes on the building of Lord Clarendon’s
from King’s College, Cambridge, in 1573, the year of Dr John Caius’s House Aug 1664 / KINGSTON LACY / 1665’ written on the cover and
death, and maybe he had learnt something of the Doctor’s interest the words ‘Ryston Hall, Downham, Norfolk’
in Renaissance architecture and its treatises. Insc: ‘1670 … A 1671’
Bound manuscripts
Private Collection
Sir Roger Pratt (1620–85)
Sir Roger Pratt was born to a landed family from Ryston Hall in
6 Edward Pierce
Norfolk. He matriculated at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1637 and Letter to Sir Roger Pratt with sketch of a scroll bracket
entered Inner Temple in 1639. His father Gregory, also a lawyer, died
in 1640, enabling him to set off in 1643 for a six-year tour of France, Insc: ‘For the Worshipfull Roger Pratt Esq In ye Inner Temple ... Building
of Horseheath Hall / Pierces Letter, London’ and ‘April 24 1665’
Italy, Flanders and Holland, ‘to give myself some convenient educa-
Pen, ink & pencil
tion’ – and what an education that was! Although Pratt matriculated
Private Collection
in law at Padua University in January 1645, law was soon superseded
by architecture. The notebooks he compiled on the Continent and
after his return to England in 1649 reveal an intellectual, thoughtful
and practical study of Italian, French and Dutch architecture, as well
Roger North (? 1653–1734)
as the more familiar architecture of Inigo Jones and John Webb. Roger North, the youngest son of Dudley, 4th Lord North, was
Although Pratt can only be credited with four houses between educated for the law, called to the Bar in 1675, and eventually
Coleshill, Berkshire, begun for Sir George Pratt in 1649, but only became Solicitor-General to the Duke of York. In a long life of near
completed in 1662, and between 1663 and 1667 the other three great 80 years North, like the older John Evelyn, whom he knew well, was
houses of Kingston Lacy, Dorset, Horseheath Hall, Cambridgeshire, a virtuoso, studying optics and mathematics, science and music, and
and Clarendon House, Piccadilly, as a group they have rightly been soon embracing architecture, which he regarded as his ‘mechanical
described as among ‘the most influential buildings in the history of entertainments’. He was soon amassing an architectural library, from
English domestic architecture’. As eminent in his day as Sir which books he learned the ‘technicalities of building’ and the
Christopher Wren and Hugh May, in 1668 Pratt was knighted for ‘niceties of draughtsmanship’. In 1683–84 he designed the Great
services to architecture. In 1664 he had inherited Ryston, where Gateway from the Temple into Fleet Street, notable for its simplicity
today his manuscript notebooks and library remain in treasured of composition. He was a friend of Wren and May. His ‘Essay on
family possession. Building’ reveals his profound knowledge of the architecture of
his time. In 1690 he bought an old house at Rougham in Norfolk
2 Sir Roger Pratt which he remodelled gradually, adding a wing with a portico based
upon Palladio’s Villa Sagredo. For this he joins that small coterie of
Elevation of Kingston Lacy, 1663 architects at the turn of the century who anticipate the revival of
Pen, ink & coloured washes (405 x 580) Palladian architecture.
Private Collection

7 Sir Roger North

Elevation of Middle Temple Gateway, c.1683
Pen, ink & coloured washes (435 x 360)
Private Collection

This early design is close to the executed gateway. The final entrance
had a flat central arch and round-headed doorways to the flanking
shops.

8 Sir Roger North

Elevation of Rougham Hall, c.1690
Pen, ink & grey wash (245 x 470)
Private Collection

3–6

28
the oxford circle
Late 17th-century Oxford was a vortex of advanced architectural ideas, in the centre of which was the learned Henry Aldrich (1648–1710), Dean
of Christ Church from 1689 and Vice-Chancellor of the university from 1692-95. As one of the ‘able judges of architecture’ he would become
involved in all Oxford’s architectural endeavours until his death, acting both directly and as a conversational éminence grise. His architectural
library, now dispersed in the general library of his college, contained more than 50 titles, many on the Antique and Antiquity. Aldrich led a
movement re-assessing Inigo Jones’s Palladianism and his Peckwater Quadrangle of 1706 marked a decisive moment in the emergence of a pure
classicism that would supplant the Wrennian Baroque. What matters for an understanding of early neo-Palladianism is Aldrich’s role as
a teacher, for he was a tutor to Sir Andrew Fountaine from 1693 to 1697 and in 1705 to Henry, Lord Herbert, later 9th Earl of Pembroke. At
his death Aldrich was preparing his Elementa Architecturae, a Vitruvian treatise on civil and military architecture, which remained incomplete.
Aldrich’s architectural interests are intertwined with those of the virtuoso and man of taste, Dr George Clarke (1661-1736), who succeeded him
as the leading figure in the architecture of the university. By 1710 Aldrich’s reputation had spread to London and Scotland, particularly to
Alexander Fletcher and Robert Gregory, seeding the new revisionist style.

Henry Aldrich (1648–1710) 9 Andrea Palladio (translated by Charles Fairfax)

Henry Aldrich became Dean of Christ Church, Oxford in 1689, Antichità di Roma, 1709
and served as Vice-Chancellor of the University from 1692 to 1695. Printed book
Although he advised on many Oxford buildings the only certain Worcester College, Oxford
attribution that can be made to him is Peckwater Quadrangle at It was Aldrich who persuaded Charles Fairfax to undertake the Latin
Christ Church begun in 1706. His startling design is one of the translation of Palladio’s Antichità di Roma, published in 1709, where
forerunners of neo-Palladian urban design, anticipating Colen in the preface Fairfax states that Palladio was Aldrich’s ‘professed
Campbell’s designs for Grosvenor Square, London, 1725, and John master in architecture’.
Wood’s for Queen Square, Bath, 1729.
Aldrich’s significant contribution was the authority he brought
to bear on the study of architecture and antiquity, and his knowl- 10 Henry Aldrich
edge of this may well have influenced Nicholas Hawksmoor’s many Elementorum architecturæ pars prima de architectura
Oxford works.
civili, c.1708
Printed book
Worcester College, Oxford

Only 10 copies of the first 44 pages of Elementa Architecturae Civilis, a

Vitruvian treatise devoted to ‘Civil and Military Architecture’, were
Henry Aldrich’s groundbreaking Peckwater Quadrangle at Christ
printed in Aldrich’s lifetime.
Church, Oxford

29
11 Henry Aldrich
Tabulae architectonicae Aldrichianae (drawings for
Elementa Architecturae), c.1708
Bound manuscript; brown ink & grey wash with George Clarke’s
bookplate
Worcester College, Oxford

This bound manuscript contains the original drawings for 39 of the

55 plates in Aldrich’s Elementa Architecturae Civilis, 1750.

12 Henry Aldrich (engraved by Sturt)

Early design for All Saints Church, Oxford, 1700
Engraving (658 x 400)
Christ Church, Oxford

13 Henry Aldrich
Teatro Olympico, Vicenza, after John Webb
Pen & ink
Worcester College, Oxford

In Aldrich’s collection is the copy he made from John Webb’s

drawing of the Teatro Olympico in Vicenza. It seems likely that
Aldrich believed that the original drawing was by Inigo Jones.

Andrew Fletcher (1653?–1716 )

Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun was famous as the most combative of Andrew Fletcher’s design for a cube-shaped house, 1699
Scottish patriots around the time of the Union of 1707, and enjoyed a
reputation as a political theorist and pamphleteer. He is also remem-
bered as a serious book-collector and owner of perhaps the largest
Sir James Burrough (1691–1764)
private library in the Scotland of his day, built up over many years of
collecting in Paris and Amsterdam. Another interest was architec- Sir James Burrough acted for the University of Cambridge as
ture, and he moved in a circle of like-minded amateurs. Fletcher is Dean Aldrich and George Clarke did for Oxford. Indeed, Aldrich
known to have designed several buildings, though in all likelihood presented him with a copy of his Elementa Architecturae. He designed
these remained as drawing-board exercises. Through his acquain- Stanwick Rectory, Northamptonshire, for Dr Peter Needham in 1717,
tance with the Oxford astronomer David Gregory he came to be the ‘Manor House’, Bury St Edmunds, for the Countess of Bristol in
known, at any rate by reputation, to Wren, Hawksmoor, William 1736, and the interior of the Norwich Assembly Rooms in 1754, but
Talman and others of the English Baroque school. apart from these private commissions, Burrough’s architectural
In 1699 Fletcher designed an intriguing and enigmatic cube- abilities were tested in his university, in general, interior works
shaped house. A suite of drawings survives among the Saltoun such as the hall at Queens’ College in 1732, or the remodelling of the
Papers in the National Library of Scotland. These show a tall, pyra- hall and quadrangle at Trinity Hall in 1742. As early as 1721 he was
midally-roofed structure, rather in the style of the contemporary associated with James Gibbs’s design for the Senate House, and in
Scottish proto-Palladian, James Smith. One front is three-bayed 1752 he offered a design for the east front of the University Library,
whereas the opposing front is five-bayed. It appears that these draw- rejected for that executed by Stephen Wright. The Burrough’s
ings accompany and illustrate - or put into words - a remarkable, Building at Peterhouse, designed in 1736, his most publicly
long letter on architectural design as exemplified by this paper exer- obvious work, is Palladian in style, but many of his designs were
cise in theory and style. Italian ‘magnificency’ is contrasted with compromises with the work of Gibbs, whom he obviously revered.
Scottish ‘meanness’. The appropriateness of differing patterns of fen-
estration to the Italian and Scottish climates is highlighted by 14 Sir James Burrough
Fletcher’s suggestion that too many windows in a domestic building
designed for Scotland made it resemble a pigeon house ‘struck out Design for Cambridge University Library, 1752
all in opens’. Engraving (465 x 322)
It seems that at some stage Fletcher’s designs (if indeed the The Syndics of Cambridge University Library
drawings really are by him) became separated from the architectural
‘essay’ that his letter effectively was, and another member of the
family, or some other connection of the designer, attempted to
construct a plan of the house based on Fletcher’s verbal description,
thus allowing not one but two architectural amateurs to savour
the intellectual challenge of designing the cubical house.

30
an oxford legacy
Sir Andrew Fountaine (1676–1753)
Sir Andrew Fountaine, of Narford Hall, Norfolk, entered Christ
Church, Oxford in 1693 and graduated in 1697, his mentor there
being Dean Henry Aldrich, the initiator of his interests in a Palladian
Revival. It was Dean Aldrich in 1698 who selected him to give the
Latin oration to William III on his entry to Oxford, for which the
young man was knighted in 1699. Fountaine was the perfect virtu-
oso, possessing ‘great Erudition’. When accompanying Thomas
Herbert, 8th Earl of Pembroke, to the opening of the Irish parlia-
ment in 1707, he had probably already made the acquaintance with
another of the Dean’s architectural progeny, Lord Pembroke’s son,
Henry, the future 9th Earl. Fountaine and Lord Herbert, as he was
then, were named with Lord Burlington as the three leading ‘practi-
cioners of [Palladian] architecture’. By 1717 Fountaine had laid out at
Narford a remarkable garden, described by George Vertue in 1739 as
‘in the best manner and wholly I believe by his own direction’, that
would be pivotal to the making of Burlington’s own garden at
Chiswick in the 1720s. From 1719–20 he added a library and court-
yard range to his own design, its long elevations and the astylar
façade influenced by Colen Campbell and his assistant, the young
Roger Morris. Fountaine’s only other documented work was a large
room for the Richmond Green house of his friend Sir Matthew
Decker. Although little is known about a report on 8 June 1728, in
the Norwich Gazette, that Fountaine was ‘to direct, as ’tis said, the
building of a Palace at Richmond’ for George II, this was the palace
for which Sir Edward Lovett Pearce made designs. Fountaine’s archi-
tectural library inventoried in 1731, and in 1753 following his death, Sir Andrew Fountaine’s remarkable garden at Narford, from Vitruvius
Britannicus Vol.III
was one of the most extensive of its time, containing nearly all the
major Italian, French and English treatises and design books.
of which Vertue wrote in 1740, ‘this is the design of the present
Earl of Pembroke and built by his direction’, is regarded as one of
15 J A Dassier the most beautiful of all garden buildings. Soon after building
Medallion of Sir Andrew Fountaine, 1744 Wimbledon House, Surrey, for Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, in
Bronze (diam. 50)
1732, Pembroke gave Morris a silver cup, on which was engraved a
Private Collection portrait of Inigo Jones, and the later inscription, ‘Given by my
Noble Patron Henry, Earl of Pembroke, by whose favour alone I
am Enabled to fill it. R. Morris 1734.’
Henry Herbert (c.1689–1750)
The water house at Houghton Hall, designed by Henry Herbert
Henry Herbert, who succeeded as 9th Earl of Pembroke in 1733, Country Life Picture Library
matriculated in 1705 at Christ Church, Oxford, where he contributed
£20 to the building of Aldrich’s Peckwater Quadrangle. As an archi-
tectural progeny of Aldrich, he shares this with his great friend Sir
Andrew Fountaine. Herbert’s Grand Tour extended from 1711 to 1713,
when he is known to have met William Kent and Lord Shaftesbury.
Although he was a collector and antiquarian, architecture was his
lifelong passion. Walpole regarded him as a purer architect than
either Burlington or Kent, but it is probably true that Herbert did
not sully himself with the building process. After Aldrich, he came
first under Colen Campbell’s influence and then may have met Roger
Morris, Campbell’s protégé. Pembroke House, Whitehall, 1724,
Marble Hill, Twickenham,1724, White Lodge, Richmond,1727,
Westcombe House, Blackheath, 1727, were all built by Morris, and
so close is the relationship between the Architect Earl and Morris,
that it is difficult to apportion responsibility, especially for what is
known as Morris’s cubist style of villa composition, as at Herbert’s
own Westcombe Lodge. The Palladian Bridge at his beloved Wilton,

31
the yorkshire connection
Rokeby Park is at the centre of a web of Yorkshire landed amateurs, many linked by family relationships. Sir Thomas Robinson of Rokeby knew
Lord Burlington well at both Chiswick and Londesborough Hall, Burlington’s Yorkshire seat. Colonel James Moyser, who designed Bretton Hall,
Yorkshire, in about 1730, was Burlington’s disciple, and must also have been closely involved with Colen Campbell before that architect’s death
in 1729. Indeed, it is probable that when Moyser designed the exterior of Nostell Priory by 1731, his design was based upon one made by
Campbell. Robinson of Rokeby also knew Thomas Worsley of Hovingham, and Worsley’s sister had married Sir Thomas Robinson of Newby,
who succeeded as 2nd Baron Grantham in 1770. Robinson’s son, Thomas Philip, Earl de Grey, was the architect of his own Wrest Park,
Bedfordshire, and became the first President of the Institute of British Architects.

Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington (1694–1753) 16

Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, dedicated himself as no other

nobleman to architecture, so much so that on 17 October 1749, Lord
Chesterfield could write to his son, ‘You may soon be acquainted
with the considerable parts of civil architecture; and for the minute
and mechanical parts of it, leave them to masons, bricklayers and
Lord Burlington, who has to a certain degree, lessened himself by
knowing them too well.’ Before Burlington had committed himself
to architecture he had employed James Gibbs and Colen Campbell,
the latter describing the Bagnio at Chiswick as ‘the first essay of his
Lordship’s happy invention, 1717’. This early Burlington could be
described as an amateur. However, the decisive transitional year is
1719 when he returned from Italy with William Kent and took per-
sonal control at both Burlington House and Chiswick. By 1720 his
drawing office had been set up in the Bagnio, guarded at its entrance
by the statues of Palladio and Jones, and Henry Flitcroft was
employed as a draughtsman and Clerk of Works. From then on
Burlington is surely acting as a professional, albeit a gentleman,
architect, who would eventually involve himself in the building
of more than 30 projects. Many of his early designs demonstrate
his method: to draw out immaturely a sketched or washed design
in plan and elevation and to pass it on to Flitcroft for precise
re-drawing, sometimes with the instructions, ‘Draw this out by
tomorrow morning’ or words to that effect. Although denying
master to the King’. Houses and architecture were Worsley’s twin
Burlington the status of an amateur, it must be recognized that
passions and, as early as 1743, he was advising Bute on building the
he stood at the centre of a web of amateur endeavour that embraced
riding house at Mount Stuart, and a year later had designed stables
Sir Andrew Fountaine, Henry, Lord Herbert, Sir Thomas Robinson
at Marske Hall near Richmond for John Hutton.
and Colonel Moyser.
In 1760 Bute undoubtedly recommended Worsley to George III to
be Surveyor-General of the King’s Works, then a political appoint-
ment, when Henry Flitcroft was Comptroller and William Chambers
Thomas Worsley (1711–78) and Robert Adam the newly appointed Joint Architects to the King.
Thomas Worsley of Hovingham Hall, Yorkshire, succeeded his Worsley was an attentive Surveyor, advising on Chambers’s design
father in 1750. It was then that he contemplated a new house built for the Riding House at Buckingham House. In fact, he and Chambers
to his own designs, a building that would progress in fits and starts remained the closest of friends until Worsley’s death. As an architec-
for nearly twenty years. Two documents reveal his early interest in tural enthusiast Worsley borrowed or purloined many ‘office’ designs
architecture, a drawing of a Doric order inscribed ‘T W Etonensis for his own collection using them as exemplars.
1728’, and the learning manual, William Salmon’s Art of Drawing, Worsley’s surviving 28 drawings for the house illustrate his
1701, inscribed ‘T Worsley 1722 Ex Libris T Worsley Etonensis 1726’. progressive thinking, first simply for a courtyard stable block, then
On his Grand Tour from 1735–38 Worsley was in Florence, Rome, for a pedimented centrepiece to the main wing of the stables, then
Geneva, and lastly in Paris. to the momentous decision to combine stables, riding house and
A clue to the origins of his architectural enthusiasms must lie the Hunting Hall with the domestic apartments as one entity –
with his mother, who was the sister of Sir Thomas Frankland of Hovingham as it is today. The inspiration was Palladio’s reconstruc-
nearby Thirkelby Park. At Frankland’s death in 1747 his library, tion of a Roman House from book four of his Quattro Libri, Worsley
sold by Samuel Baker on 18 and 19 June that year, is revealed as having bought the first 1570 edition in 1757. Memorable are
the finest architectural library in the north of England. Suggestively, Chambers’s recollections of the screams of pain to be heard
Sir Thomas may have been Worsley’s mentor. Horace Walpole throughout the house from Worsley’s suffering from the stone,
described Worsley as ‘a creature of Lord Bute, and a kind of riding- from which he died.

32
18

16–18 Thomas Worsley

Designs for Hovingham Hall
Pencil, pen & coloured washes (441 x 405; 360 x 510; 330 x 549)
Worsley Collection

19 & 20 Thomas Worsley

Designs for a domed temple
Pen & coloured washes (257 x 382; 300 x 169)
Worsley Collection

21 Thomas Worsley
Drawing for Doric Order
Pen & ink (376 x 303)
Worsley Collection

21

20

33
George III (1738–1820)
23 George III
There is more surviving paper evidence of architectural design for
George III than for any other European monarch. When his father, Design for a doorway at Buckingham House
Frederick, Prince of Wales, died suddenly in 1751 Kew Gardens was in Pen & coloured washes (252 x 153)
the throes of new works that had been in progress since 1748. There Worsley Collection
is evidence that in the summer of 1749 William Chambers had been
consulted by Prince Frederick and the Princess Augusta as an expert,
24 Lucius Gahagan (attrib.) (1773–1855)
having just returned from China. In 1756 Chambers was appointed Statuette of George III, c.1800
architectural tutor to George, Prince of Wales. No prince could have Bronze (h. 150)
been better served, for in 1757 the Dowager Princess Augusta com- Private Collection
manded Chambers to design and lay out new gardens, and over the
next two years Chambers used his tuition to compose his masterful Sir Thomas Robinson (c. 1702–77)
Treatise on Civil Architecture, 1759. Not only did Prince George learn
Sir Thomas Robinson, the heir of Rokeby, Yorkshire, commissioned
paper design, but it was a learning based upon the practical building
a design for a new house in 1724 from the York architect William
of more than seventeen temples and garden ornaments. For the next
Wakefield. This he rejected by 1725, and decided to design his own
thirty years George III took a continued interest in the royal works,
house, based upon Pliny’s villa at Tusculum. In 1728 he married the
notably the remodelling of Buckingham House, and in the many
eldest daughter of Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle, and they set
projects for a new palace at Richmond. Indeed, it is likely that the
out together for continental travels, returning in 1731. Between 1735
model for Richmond Palace in 1762 was a joint effort of the king
and 1741 Robinson issued a set of engraved designs for Rokeby
and Chambers.
signed ‘T. Robinson Bar. Architectus’, probably drawn by Isaac
Ware, who may have been his amanuensis. The house was long in
22 George III building, for Robinson’s was an expensive lifestyle, resulting in his
Plate from John Joshua Kirby, The Perspective of departure for Barbados in 1741 as Governor in order to relieve his
Architecture … deduced from the Principles of Dr. Brook finances. He designed many buildings there. He returned to London
in 1747 and, in 1749, built himself a house in Whitehall. Also, in his
Taylor, 1761, from a design by George III for a small capacity as Master of Ceremonies at Ranelagh Gardens he built a
palace large Prospect Place adjacent to the Gardens. His correspondence
Engraving (380 x 564) with his father-in-law Lord Carlisle on architectural matters reveals
Worsley Collection his deep, sensitive, and thoroughly professional knowledge of archi-
tecture. His was the distinguished Kentian-style western court at
23
Castle Howard built between 1753 and 1759. For Ralph, 2nd Lord
Verney, one of the proprietors of Ranelagh Gardens, at Claydon
House, Buckinghamshire, he began to build a huge new range
containing magnificent state rooms, incomplete at Robinson’s
death in 1777. They would have bankrupted his lordship.

25 Sir Thomas Robinson

Bird’s-eye view of Rokeby Hall (north elevation), c.1740
Engraving (312 x 470)
The Dean and Chapter of York

26 Sir Thomas Robinson

Design for the west front of Claydon House,
Buckinghamshire, c.1777
Pen, ink & grey wash (829 x 1219)
The National Trust

26
Westley/Country Life Picture Library

34
 29
Thomas Robinson, 2nd Baron Grantham (1738–86) 29 Thomas Robinson
Thomas Robinson succeeded Sir Thomas Robinson of Newby Hall, The Root House, Newby Park, 1785
Yorks, as 2nd Baron Grantham. His interest in architecture may have Pen, ink & coloured washes (560 x 740)
been encouraged by Thomas Worsley of Hovingham, his uncle on West Yorkshire Archives
his mother’s side. As far as we know he was a paper architect,
although one of real ability, possessing an attractive draughting
style. He was celebrated in Italy 1759-61 as a most knowing connois-
seur, where he is found studying at the Academy in Turin with Lord
Newborough in 1759. Upon his return he was elected to the Society
of Dilettanti and the Society of Antiquaries in 1763. Among his
designs was a Triumphal Arch at Hyde Park Corner in 1761, offices,
stables and garden buildings at Newby Park, the Colen Campbell
house, now known as Baldersby, and a prospect tower for his broth-
er-in-law John Parker of Saltram. As Ambassador in Madrid from
1771 to 1779, his correspondence with Sir William Chambers under-
lines his very competent knowledge of architecture.

27 Thomas Robinson
Elevation of triumphal arch for Hyde Park Corner, 1761
Pen & ink (380 x 580)
West Yorkshire Archives

28 Thomas Robinson
Elevation of a tower, Saltram, c.1769
Pencil, pen & brown wash (800 x 590)
West Yorkshire Archives

28

35
Colonel James Moyser (c.1688–1751) Thomas Philip De Grey, Earl de Grey (1781–1859)
Colonel James Moyser of Beverley was an officer in the regiment of Thomas Philip De Grey, Earl de Grey, was born the elder son of
foot of Sir Charles Hotham, who had employed Campbell to design Thomas Robinson, 2nd Baron Grantham, from whom he might
his house in Eastgate of that town in 1716. In Spain Colonel Moyser have inherited amateur architectural interests, but only as genes, for
was Adjutant to the 1st Earl Stanhope, and so might have been his father died in 1786 when Thomas Philip aged five became 3rd
expected to have been aware of the ‘New Junta for Architecture’, a Baron Grantham. His mother was Mary, second daughter of Philip
Palladian movement supported by Stanhope in contention with the Yorke, 2nd Earl of Hardwick, and Jemima, Marchioness Grey of
Baroque of Vanbrugh. Exactly how Moyser became interested in Wrest Park. Thomas Philip’s family seat was Newby Park (renamed
architecture is unclear. He was certainly a friend of Lord Burlington. Baldersby), a Colen Campbell villa. Under the will of William
He assisted Sir William Wentworth in the design of Bretton Hall, Weddell, a distant relative, he inherited Newby Hall, so confusingly
Yorkshire, c.1730, and in 1746 offered designs for Gunthwaite, as ‘the becoming the owner of two seats of the same name. At the
most convenient, the handsomest, and the cheapest of any House in Campbell Newby he added a dining-room to his own design in 1808,
Yorkshire’, and to Stephen Thompson for Kirby Hall, also Yorkshire, the executant architect being John Shaw. When he inherited Wrest
its plan ‘a perfect Model of Ld. Orford’s at Houghton’. However, it is Park, Bedfordshire, through his mother, he replaced the vast old
for the elevations of Nostell Priory that Moyser’s skill as an amateur house set in formal gardens with a French chateau, building between
architect must be judged. There is little originality and a certain 1834 and 1839. As he wrote, ‘I was strictly and in every sense of the
dullness in the proportions. Campbell almost certainly offered word my own architect . . . I had my French books always under my
designs before his death in 1729, and these designs, based on a plan hand’. The executant was James Clephan. Most of de Grey’s designs
of Palladio’s Villa Mocenigo, relating also to Houghton, were passed are signed with a G surmounted with a coronet. As Howard Colvin
on to Moyser by 1731. However the house was not begun until 1737. writes, ‘The result was a tour de force of French eighteenth-century
architectural design on English soil.’ Around Wrest Park his were the
Silsoe Lodges and Silsoe Church, the latter in 1830–31 in an authentic
Perpendicular Gothic. As one who preferred ‘to move among men of
letters and artists at the various learned societies of which he was a
member’, it was not surprising that in 1835 he was invited to be the
first President of the newly founded Institute of British Architects,
which position he held until his death.

30 Earl de Grey
Plan and elevation for Wrest Park, Bedfordshire c.1834
Pen, ink & coloured washes (380 x 580)
RIBA Drawings Collection

Nostell Priory

30

36
amateur architects & professional executants
Robert Dingley (1710–81)
Robert Dingley, a merchant, member of the Russia Company,
Director of the Bank of England, governor of the Foundling Hospital
and one of the founders of the Magdalen Hospital for penitent pros-
titutes, used his great wealth not only as a philanthropist, but as a
collector and antiquarian, and was one of the original members of
the Society of Dilettanti. His unexecuted engraved designs for the
Magdalen Hospital c.1763 and for the King’s and Queen’s Baths in
Bath, c.1766 are in a conservative Palladian style. No drawings by
Dingley for them have so far been identified. It is reasonable to
suggest links and friendship with Theodore Jacobsen, the Hanseatic
merchant and architect of the Foundling Hospital.

Robert Dingley’s unexecuted design for Magdalen Hospital c.1763

Theodore Jacobsen (died 1772)

From 1735 Theodore Jacobsen actively managed the London Thomas Prowse (c.1708–67)
Steelyard for the Hanseatic merchants. Yet he was also an amateur
architect, first in 1726 for the East India Company, who adopted the Thomas Prowse, representing Somerset in Parliament from
‘ground plat and front presented by Theeodore Jacobsen’for their 1740 until his death, was perhaps the beau idéal of the country
new building in Leadenhall Street. The executant was John James. gentleman acting as an amateur architect. Although no drawings
There is then an unexplained hiatus, although his design for the survive by him, he was clearly a very able designer. He was friendly
Bank of England offered in 1731 was rejected, although engraved. His with two ‘Sandersons’, Sanderson Miller whom he advised on the
next commission was the Foundling Hospital in 1742, this time the design of Hagley Hall, Worcestershire, 1754–60, and John Sanderson,
execution entrusted to James Horne, who was also the builder from who was the executant of his designs, and was also involved at
1745 of Jacobsen’s Royal Naval Hospital for Sick Sailors at Haslar Hagley. Wicken church, Northamptonshire, on the estate inherited
near Portsmouth. In 1752 he supplied designs for Trinity College, through his wife, was ‘designed and built by Thomas Prowse Esqr’
Dublin, with Henry Keene and John Sanderson on call as builders. from 1753 in a Sanderson Miller Gothic style, assisted by John
In general Jacobsen adopted a simple astylar elevational treatment Sanderson, who also enlarged Wicken House for Prowse in 1765.
with pavilions around a courtyard. In his will he refers to his books Hatch Court, Somerset, was an ingenious Palladian tower villa, built
of architecture and a portfolio containing his designs, one of which for John Collins in 1755, and towers too were added to Kimberley
may have been for his own house at Lonesome Lodge at Wooton in Hall, Norfolk, under Sanderson’s directions in 1755–57. The Lawn,
Surrey, built in 1740 for summer use. Swindon, was refronted for Thomas Goddard in 1757; and
Prowse designed the Temple of Harmony at Halswell, Somerset,
built in 1764.
31 Theodore Jacobsen
A View of the Foundling Hospital engraved by B Cole
Engraving (215 x 336)
Private Collection

31

37
the gothicists
The early Gothic Revival – often facetiously described as ‘Gothic with a k’, was very much the preserve of the amateur interventionists. John
Freeman’s Gothic Temple at Fawley is remarkably innovative, having been built before 1732. By the mid-1730s Dickie Bateman at Old Windsor
had already extended his house in Gothick, and by the mid-1740s Sanderson Miller was building Gothic towers or castles around his house at
Radway in Warwickshire that evoked in the mind romantic visions of knightly ancestry, or as Walpole commented, ‘the true rust of the
Barons’ wars’. By 1750 Miller was advising Sir Roger Newdigate on Gothic work at Arbury Hall, Warwickshire, and Newdigate himself was
making sketches for Gothic additions to his seat in the south at Harefield Place and church in Middlesex. Through many connections both of
family and friendship there spread throughout the Midlands a web of Gothic endeavour, taken up by professionals (Henry Keene or William
and John Hiorne) and amateurs alike. In fact, Miller did far more than any other amateur to spread the Gothick disease, for more than twenty
of his works are in the Gothic style. Indeed Arbury served as a vortex of Midland’s Gothic enthusiasm, as did Strawberry Hill in the south,
where the amateur members of Horace Walpole’s Committee of Taste comprised Richard Bentley between 1751 and 1761, John Chute through
the 1750s, and Thomas Pitt, Lord Camelford in the 1760s. Chute, who was a professional and clever draughtsman, helped to design Chalfont
House, Buckinghamshire c.1755, where Bentley designed the Gothic stables c.1760, and in 1763 designed Donnington Grove, Berkshire, for his
friend the antiquary James Pettit Andrews.

John Chute (1701–76)

John Chute inherited the family seat of The Vyne in 1754. He had
spent six years in Italy from 1740–46, something more than just a
traditional Grand Tour, for Chute asked Horace Walpole, ‘Tell me
what you think of my living forever in Florence?’ He studied archi-
tecture, and because Walpole thought him ‘an able Geometrician,
and . . . an Exquisite Architect, and of the purest taste both in the
Grecian and Gothic Styles’, it is not surprising that Chute soon
found himself appointed to Walpole’s Committee of Taste for the
building of Strawberry Hill acquired in 1747, but not begun until
1749. It would seem that initially he and Richard Bentley worked as
a duo assisted by William Robinson for practical building. Only later
in 1762 did Thomas Pitt join the Committee. Chute seems to have
designed the elevations for the house and many of the interiors
including the Gallery; he was also author, with Pitt, of much of the
Gothic Chapel built in 1772. Chalfont House, Bucks. is Chute’s
around 1755 in Strawberry’s Gothic style, so is his most successful
house, Donnington Grove, Berkshire, in 1763. His drawings are a
wonder, especially the many complex studies for the staircase in
The Vyne, described as ‘a theatrical tour de force that has no parallel
in English country house architecture’. When Chute died in 1776
Walpole bemoaned that ‘he was my oracle in taste, the standard to
whom I submitted my trifles, and the genius that presided over
poor Strawberry!’
Staircase at The Vyne English Heritage.NMR

32 John Chute
Donnington Grove © Crown copyright.NMR
Elevation for Strawberry Hill, 1753
Pencil (288 x 406)
Hampshire Record Office

33 John Chute
Perspective for south front of the Vyne and other sketches,
c.1770
Pen & pencil (185 x 230)
Hampshire Record Office

34 John Chute
Perspective of a two-storey portico, c.1770
Pencil (230 x 185)
Hampshire Record Office

38
35

The Bridge of Rocks at Park Place, designed by Thomas Pitt, 1763. Photo:
Robert Hradsky

Sir Roger Newdigate (1719–1806)

Sir Roger Newdigate was a connoisseur and antiquarian. He devel-
oped his deep interest in art, architecture, and especially painting
galleries on his two Italian tours in 1739 –40 and 1774– 75. In the lat-
ter years he was a friend and patron of Piranesi, from whom he
bought 12 bound volumes of his prints, as well as a duplicate set,
which he presented to the Ashmolean Museum with two of
Piranesi’s composed candelabra. His enthusiasms made his Arbury
35 John Chute Hall, Warwickshire, into the Strawberry Hill of the Midlands, and as
such enormously influential. Although he made many designs for it,
Sketches in perspective of staircases, c.1770
as well as for Harefield church, and Harefield Place, Middlesex, to
Pen & ink (230 x 185) achieve his aims he employed a team of executants that included
Hampshire Record Office
Sanderson Miller, the Hiornes, Henry Keene and Henry Couchman.
Apart from Arbury and Harefield, the only other project he was
involved in was an unexecuted Palladian design for his brother-in-
Thomas Pitt (1737–93) law John Conyers at Copt Hall in Essex in the 1740s, a house eventu-
Thomas Pitt was created 1st Baron Camelford in 1784. He travelled to ally built in 1753 by John Sanderson. He endowed the Newdigate
Spain and Portugal with Lord Strathmore in 1760, when he already Prize for Poetry at the University of Oxford.
made intelligent observations on Moorish and Gothic architecture.
When in Florence he heard of his father’s death and his succession to
Boconnoc in Cornwall. In 1762 he rented a small house at 36 Sir Roger Newdigate
Twickenham, facetiously dubbed Palazzo Pitti by Walpole, who Sketches for Gothic architecture, including fan-vaulting,
reckoned him ‘one of the very few . . . quite worthy of being at home c.1750
at Strawberry’. He advised on much interior decoration there,
Pencil (200 x 310)
notably the ‘ornaments’ of the Gallery and Chapel. How he acted as Warwickshire County Record Office (by kind permission of Lord
an amateur architect is uncertain, as no designs survive from his Daventry)
hand. His was the Gothic Cottage and Bridge of Rocks at General
Conway’s Park Place, Henley-on-Thames, in 1763 and the Palladian 36
Bridge at Hagley for his uncle Sir Richard Lyttelton ‘built after
young Mr. Pitt’s design’ in 1764. The following year he designed the
Corinthian Arch at Stowe House, Bucks., and it is reliably certain
that he was responsible for the final form of the great south front at
Stowe between 1772 and 1777. At his beloved Boconnoc, his was the
south wing in a Palladian style, and Palladian also was Camelford
House, Park Lane, built in 1771. He was elected to the Society of
Dilettanti in 1763, and in 1785 was unsuccessful in persuading the
Society to convert two of his houses in Hereford Street into a muse-
um. Surprisingly he was one of Sir John Soane’s earliest patrons, and
it was Soane who paid tribute in his Memoirs to Pitt’s ‘classical taste
and profound architectural knowledge’, and in one of his lectures
coupled his name with those of Burlington and Pembroke as leaders
of architectural taste in England.

39
 Sanderson Miller (1716–80) William Stukeley (1687–1765)
Sanderson Miller in 1717 found himself the master of Radway William Stukeley was a founder member in 1717 of what became the
Grange, Warwickshire, with an ample fortune to devote himself to Society of Antiquaries. He was voted Secretary and John Talman
a life of landscape gardening and architecture. His thatched cottage Director. The latter was described by Stukeley as ‘a gentleman who
built at Edgehill in 1744 was one of the first, preceding even those by traveling into Italy, made himself a master in architecture. He drew
Thomas Wright. More than 40 works can be associated with him, well; had a vast collection of drawings, chiefly in ecclesiastical mat-
and this extraordinary output between 1743 and 1766 really makes ters.’ Both were antiquaries, who in their various ways encouraged a
Miller a professional amateur. A great number, especially the Gothic Gothic Revival, quite different from the Rococo Gothic of William
ones, are likely to have been executed by the Hiorns of Warwick. Kent in 1732. Indeed, Talman’s design for the Hall and Chapel at All
He was an extensive correspondent, but it is still unclear how he Souls, Oxford, offered in March 1708, and self-confessedly, ‘unlike
could command such a large practice, much larger than most any other in Oxon & pretty much after ye Italian Gothic’ can only be
professionals, without a business office. compared to the 16th-century designs for the façade of S. Petronio in
Bologna. However, despite an abundance of Baroque and classical
37 Sanderson Miller designs, it is difficult to judge Talman as a gentleman amateur, for he
emerged out of the professionalism and tuition of his father
Design for a room at Arbury Hall, 1750 William.
Pencil (211 x 296) Stukeley is different. As a founder member of the Egyptian
Warwickshire County Record Office (by kind permission of Lord Society in December 1741, a month later he introduced his friend and
Daventry)
patron John, 2nd Duke of Montagu (1690–1749), who can also claim
to be an amateur architect, with, in Stukeley’s words ‘a very good
knack of drawing and designing’. Montagu had a hand in the designs
for Clitheroe Castle, Lancs. in 1740, the barracks at Woolwich in 1741
and many castle projects on his Northamptonshire estates. In his
obituary of the Duke Stukeley wrote, ‘We had exactly the same taste
for old family concerns, genealogy, pictures, furniture, coats of
arms, the old way of building, gardening and the like; in a general
imitation of pure nature in the Gothic architecture, in painted glass,
in the open hearted, candid way in designing and free manner of
conversation.’ In 1744 the Duke asked Stukeley for a drawing and a
wooden model of a Gothic Bridge for the park at Boughton, and on
4 October 1748, ‘A design for the chapel at Boughton house in the
north east wing’, a most precocious, daringly Gothic, fan-vaulted
design that has no precedent in the Gothic Revival in England.
37

Above: Model of Stukeley’s Gothic Bridge at Boughton

Photo by kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Buccleuch and
Queensberry, KT

Left: The octagonal chamber at Warwick Shire Hall, by Sanderson Miller

40
the amateur as innovator John Erskine, 6th Earl of Mar and 11th Lord Erskine
(1675–1732)
Richard Jones, 3rd Viscount and 1st Earl of Ranelagh Two passions dominated the life of John Erskine, 6th Earl of Mar and
(?1638–1712) 11th Lord Erskine: ‘political intrigue and architectural design’. For
the former he suffered exile as a Jacobite, and even when he severed
Richard Jones, 3rd Viscount and 1st Earl of Ranelagh, an Irish peer, is his connections with the Pretender’s court in 1725, he was never for-
an amateur architect for there is no surviving evidence of draught- given by the English government, and died abroad in 1732. He was a
ing ability. As Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer, and a friend of the paper architect, a dreamer, of whom it was said that ‘his only amuse-
Duke of Ormonde, he amassed a huge fortune from public office, ment during his exile was to draw plans and designs’. No architect
and ‘spent more money, built more fine houses, and laid out more was more fertile in his inventions, and in the matter of the amateur
on household-furniture and gardening, than any other Nobleman in intervention he was corresponding with other amateurs such as Sir
England’. He advised Lord Conway in his buildings in Newmarket, Thomas Robinson at Rokeby or Sir William Wentworth and
Cambridgeshire, and at Ragley, Worcestershire, c.1679–80. To serve Colonel Moyser at Bretton. His is a conservative Franco-Italian
himself as Treasurer of Chelsea Hospital he built adjoining a large influence in design, and the relationship to James Gibbs is yet to be
tall red brick house c.1688–89, not unlike a taller version of Wren’s fully investigated, as is the actual connections between Mar and the
Winslow Hall, Buckinghamshire, with gardens later to become the very many landowners for whom he made designs. Howard Colvin
famous Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens. In June 1700 William III made writes of him as ‘a unique figure in British architectural history.
him ‘Sur-intendent generall of oure Buildings & of our works in our Though a nostalgic fantasy runs through so many of his designs, no
parks’, and to this end he bought from Lord Lexington Cranbourn one can examine them without recognizing an able and fertile
Lodge in Windsor Great Park, extending it as well as laying out new imagination, or fail to conclude that if Scotland had lost a lord of
gardens by London and Wise. In 1704 he supervised the enlargement dubious political integrity in 1715, she also lost an amateur architect
of the Duke of Ormonde’s house in Richmond Park. When he died of some distinction.’ Mar lived at Twickenham next door to the
his legacies included his two drawers of mathematical instruments, house of the Hon. James Johnston, Secretary for Scotland, that had
rulers and perspective glasses to his ‘dear friend John, Earl of Mar’, been completed by John James in 1710, to which Gibbs added the
and £20 each to John Churchill, Master Carpenter and Henry Wise, Octagon Room in 1720. Mar’s design ‘for ornamenting Mr
Master Gardener, ‘to buy silver in remembrance of me who was Johnston’s house’ is dated June 1721.
heartily his friend’.

39 Earl of Mar
38 Dr George Clarke (1661–1736)
Elevation of Johnston’s house Twickenham, 1721
Design for converting Ranelagh House into a Palladian
Pen & ink (277 x 306)
Thames-side villa, c.1688 National Archives of Scotland
Insc: ‘Ld Ranelagh’s’
Pen & ink (100 x 190)
Worcester College, Oxford 40 Earl of Mar
This elevation of a neo-Palladian villa appears to show a project for Design for House of Dun, 1723
converting the Wren-style brick house by Chelsea Hospital, by the Pen, ink & coloured washes (390 x 253)
1st Earl of Ranelagh in the 1680s, into a Palladian villa by the National Archives of Scotland
Thames. This drawing, although inscribed by the Oxford amateur 39
George Clarke, might in fact have been copied from one made by
Ranelagh himself before his death in 1712.

38

41
Ambrose Phillips (1707–37) Robert Hampden-Trevor, 4th Baron Trevor and 1st
Ambrose Phillips was of Garendon Park, Leicestershire, an estate Viscount Hampden (1706–83)
acquired by his grandfather in 1683. He died tragically young at Robert Hampden Trevor, 4th Baron Trevor and 1st Viscount
the age of 30, his passion for architecture commemorated by the Hampden, was educated at Queen’s College, Oxford and was elected
inscription on his tomb in Shepsted church: Ex Italia reverses/inspectis a Fellow of All Souls in 1725. Trevor possibly discovered his interest
antiquorum aedificiorum Reliquijs Artes Romanus in Patrium transtulit,/Et in architecture at Queen’s, where from 1710 to 1721 George Clarke
inter Principes viros qui jam Architecturam /inAnglia restituere et perpolire and Nicholas Hawksmoor were planning the college. Trevor was a
coeperant/Enituit pene Primus. diplomat at The Hague, and from 1759 to 1765 was a joint postmaster
Little is known about Phillips’s early life, who in Italy was general. He was distinguished for his intellectual and literary
described as the ‘handsome Englishman’. His extensive travels in achievements, and as a connoisseur his collection of drawings and
France and Italy followed his inheritance of Garendon in 1729. He prints was regarded as ‘one of the choicest in England’. Although the
returned to England after Easter 1732, when he was among the first dozen of his surviving architectural drawings show him to have had
connoisseurs to be elected to the Society of Dilettanti, no doubt due great ability in architecture, no building designed by him has been
to family relationships, for his mother was a first cousin of Sir identified, although when he succeeded to the Great Hampden
Francis Dashwood of West Wycombe. estates in Buckinghamshire in 1754, the Gothic additions at that
His surviving album of drawings is precious evidence of his house must surely be by him. All his drawings betray Baroque
first-hand study of ancient Rome, unlike the architecture of Lord tendencies that might suggest a study of Oxford building. Indeed
Burlington, derivative from the printed paper evidence of Palladio. he produced a Pantheon-like rotunda design for the Radcliffe
What is even more exceptional is his study of the Roman archi- Library c.1737
tecture of Provence, using that architecture to compose his own
designs, notably the Triumphal Archway at Garendon, a
reconstruction of the Arch of Titus that was only restored in its
42 4th Baron Trevor
completeness in 1822. As extraordinary is his record drawing of Design for a house in Spring Gardens,
the Porte du Peyrou at Montpellier and his associated Palladian Pen, ink & grey wash
designs for building around the Place Royale du Peyrou in an RIBA Drawings Collection
English Palladian style, a unique example of English Palladianism
in France. The park at Garendon is one of the finest examples of
an antique Roman templescape, albeit one of small acreage,
although his incomplete Palladian house has been demolished.

41 Ambrose Phillips
‘ The Garendon Album’, c.1730
Bound manuscript
RIBA Drawings Collection

Right: Drawing by Ambrose Phillips of the Roman Triumphal Arch at Orange

from the Garendon Album (Cat.41)

Below: Design by Ambrose Phillips for the Place Royale du Peyrou,

Montpellier, from the Garendon Album (Cat.41)

42
 estate improvers
John Freeman (c.1689–1752)
With the exception of the saloon in Honington Hall, Warwickshire,
built for Joseph Townsend, John Freeman confined his architectural
virtuosity to his own estate, at Fawley Court, Bucks., which he inher-
ited in 1707. He has left a substantial number of designs, notably for
various garden buildings. The Gothic folly, intended to display clas-
sical marbles from the Arundel collection, is an astonishingly
advanced building of the Gothic Revival, probably dating to before
1731 when Freeman bought the adjacent Henley Park, where he
confessed to ‘planting trees, making theatres, and building castles
in the air’. The 60 architectural titles in his library were of the
standard treatises, but significantly few of the usual English design
books such as those by Batty Langley or William Halfpenny. In
1748 Freeman re-fitted the interior of Fawley church from material
salvaged from Canons House, Middlesex, when his architect was
George Shakespeare. In 1750 he built the family mausoleum in
Fawley churchyard, based upon G B Montano’s reconstructions of
Roman mausolea, which book was in his library. The executant
architect for the Honington Hall saloon in 1751 was William Jones.

43 & 44 John Freeman

Designs for a Gothic Temple, c.1728
Pencil (380 x 245)
Private Collection
The Gothic Temple at Fawley Court. Photo: Robert Hradsky
43

45 John Freeman
Design for floor of Gothic Temple, c.1738
Pen & ink (225 x 280)
Private Collection

46–49 John Freeman

Designs for Rustic Bridge, c.1728
Pen (202 x 187; 130 x 300; 193 x 185; 255 x 374)
Private Collection

John Buxton (1685–1731)

The son and heir of Robert Buxton of Channons Hall, John Buxton
also inherited the Earsham estate in Norfolk from his mother. His
interest in architecture and skill as a designer is attested by a num-
ber of surviving drawings in his hand, now at Cambridge University
Library. His work included Blixley Hall in Norfolk and his own
house at Earsham. In 1721 he moved to Channons, modernizing the
house and constructing a new house, Shadwell Lodge.

47 John Buxton
Design for Shadwell Lodge, c.1721
Pen & ink (207 x 326)
The Syndics of Cambridge University Library

43
Thomas Hope (1769–1831) much given to the amusements of Drawing, Planning of Maps and
Building’. As an astronomer he published Universal Vicissitudes of the
If the French had not occupied Holland in 1795, Thomas Hope might Seasons, 1737, The Use of the Globes, 1740, Clavis Coelestis, 1742, and An
not have come to live in London. From his family home near Original Theory and New Hypothesis of the Universe, 1750. He is credited
Haarlem he had travelled extensively throughout Europe and the with the discovery of the Milky Way. He spent his life travelling
Near East, making fine topographical drawings. In 1799 he bought through the genealogies of linked families, passing on from one to
the Duchess Street house of General Robert Clerk, designed by the other, and often staying for weeks on end. Wherever he went, he
Robert Adam, and in 1807 the eighteenth-century Deepdene near advised on and designed, architecture, gardens, and garden build-
Dorking. Both houses would be radically transformed. The first ings, from the earliest, Beaumont Lodge, Old Windsor, for the
architect employed by Hope was C H Tatham, who prepared designs Dowager, Duchess of Kent, in 1743, to an observatory for himself at
in June 1799 for the Duchess Street Picture Gallery. As one design is Westerton Hill, Durham, a year before his death. The families to
inscribed by Hope ‘from my own design, afterwards altered with which he was closest were those of the Duchess of Kent and her rela-
respect to the lights’, this possessive comment might suggest that tions at Wrest Park, Bedfordshire; Norborne Berkeley and his sister
Tatham was not retained, maybe because their tastes in architecture Elizabeth Berkeley (later 4th Duchess of Beaufort) at Stoke Giffard
and the presentation of antique sculpture were so similar. Hope’s and Badminton, Gloucestershire, and the 2nd Duke of Halifax.
own design for the interior treatment of the gallery is the only sur- Another friend was the Earl of Limerick, who is associated with his
viving evidence for his paper role as an amateur designer. The travels in Ireland, 1746–47, when Wright published Louthiana, or an
Deepdene was transformed in 1818–19 and in 1823, the year it was Introduction to the Antiquities of Ireland, 1748, a pioneering work. His
visited by C R Cockerell. The conservative William Atkinson was most significant architectural works included Nuthall Temple,
executant. It was surely Hope and no other who transformed a Nottinghamshire, for Sir Charles Sedley 1754, one of the four great
plain house into one of the triumphs of European Picturesque Palladian rotunda villas in England; the extensive remodelling of
architecture, as recognized by Cockerell, who thought ‘the genius Stoke Giffard; the south front of Horton House, Northants., c.1760,
loci is remarkably recalled’, and concluded, ‘Novelty has a vast effect and the building of Hampton Court House, Middlesex, c.1765, for
in archtr. We are sick to see the same thing repeated & over again Lord Halifax. But above all Wright is famed for the myriad of
what has been seen anytime these 100 Yrs. The Deepdene attracts in ornamental garden buildings, most notably on the Badminton
this respect exceeding but if the Pompeian style can be so cultivated estate. What confuses the historian is the fact that Wright neither
as to practice well it may supercede the Templar style in which we appears in building accounts, nor is he paid. Not only did he teach
have so long worked.’ Hope played a crucial role as a connoisseur, mathematics, the polite arts, drawing, and astronomy to the
notably by his criticisms in 1804 in his Observations on the Plans and families, but he was an endearing companion who seems every-
Elevations designed by James Wyatt, Architect, for Downing College, Camb.; where to have been treated as one of the family. In a sense he is
in a letter to Francis Annesley, Esq., M.P., and even more so by his not unlike William Kent, whom he could have met at Badminton
printed record of the rooms and furnishings of Duchess Street in 1747, if not earlier, for Wright’s pen and ink landscape studies are
in Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, 1807. almost indistinguishable from those by Kent.
Duchess Street was demolished in 1850, and the Deepdene, by
British Rail (curse them!), in 1969.
51 Thomas Wright
Plate D from Six Original Designs of Arbours, 1755
Thomas Wright (1711–86) ‘Elevation of an Ornithon, or Arbour of the Aviary Kind,
chiefly contrived for the Reception of singing and other
Thomas Wright could be regarded as the arch amateur of them all.
beautiful Birds’
He was an astronomer, architect and landscape gardener, who even
Engraving (300 x 490)
at the age of 14 was, ‘much in love with Mathematics’ and ‘very
Private Collection

51

44
 This volume contains many contemporary notes in Lady
lady amateurs Wilbraham’s hand, some relating to the building of Weston Park
and the Church at Weston and concerning costs and prices agreed.
Lady Wilbraham (1632–1705)
Elizabeth, later Lady Wilbraham, was the only daughter and heir of Ada (Augusta) King, Countess of Lovelace (1815–52)
Edward Mytton (d.1638) of Weston in Staffordshire to whose estates
Ada (Augusta) King, Countess of Lovelace, was born Ada Byron, the
she succeeded at the age of six. As a 20-year-old, she married Sir
only child of Lord Byron the poet and Anna Isabella Noel Milbanke,
Thomas Wilbraham of Woodhey in Cheshire in the parish church
so soon to be estranged from her husband. Ada secured initial fame
of St Andrew at Weston and appears to have demonstrated a head-
through the opening lines of canto three of Byron’s Childe Harold:
strong management of her family property as her articulate pose in
Sir Peter Lely’s portrait might suggest. A silver cup in the church at Ada! Sole daughter of my house and heart?
Acton on her husband’s Cheshire estate is inscribed ‘The gift of the When last I saw thy young blue eyes they smiled,
Honble. Lady Wilbraham of Weston in Staffordshire to the Church And then we parted – not as now we part, But with a hope.
of Acton in Cheshire’, making no reference to either her husband or
their Cheshire property. Her architectural endeavours appear to be She was deliberately brought up by her mother, fearful of her
poorly documented, although speculation has attributed her becoming a poet, as a mathematician and scientist, taught by the
involvement at a number of houses without firm evidence. Lady famous mathematician Augustus de Morgan. In 1833 aged only 18
Wilbraham’s rebuilding of Weston Park from 1671 and her hus- she met Charles Babbage, a conjunction of minds that would prove
band’s seat at Woodhey in the 1680s are referred to in the manu- decisive in the history of the computer, because they both worked
script notes on the flyleaves of her copy of Godfrey Richards’s 1663 together on his new calculating engine, she proving a genius in
English translation of Palladio’s First Book of Architecture which providing clear explanatory texts. She is honoured in the USA
remains in the collection at Weston. Attesting to her knowledge of by the Department of Defence naming its computer software
architecture, the notes record the cost of materials and work. They language Ada.
also include a memorandum of her bargain with Sir William In 1835 Ada married William King, 8th Baron King of Ockham,
Wilson, the sculptor for setting up four monuments, ‘2 of the Better, created Earl of Lovelace in 1838. Owning estates in North Devon,
2 of the Worser, sort and for finding alapaster [sic] and marble £23’. soon after 1835 on a headland above Porlock Weir she created a rus-
tic Plinean villa overlooking the sea. It was really an earlier cottage
ornée substantially enlarged, and was notable for the tunnel struck
52 Andrea Palladio through the cliffs, debouching on to the headland, where the cliffs
The First Book of Architecture (1st English translation behind were faced and ornamented with arcuated Roman-style
ruins. It is unclear to what extent she was responsible for Lord
Godfrey Richards), 1663
Lovelace’s East Horsley Towers before her tragic death in 1852,
Printed book when she was buried at her request next to her father.
The Weston Park Foundation

Below: Sketch of Ashley Combe, Somerset

45
Sarah Losh (c.1786–1853)
Sara or Sarah Losh was the architect of at least eighteen building
works in and around her native village of Wreay in Cumbria. Her
masterpiece, the parish church of St Mary, was consecrated in 1842.
Built in a style she described as ‘modified Saxon or early Lombard’, it
was designed as a memorial to her sister Catherine. The astonishing
iconographic programme expresses a romantic pantheism, its
imagery playing on symbols of eternity and resurrection, drawn
from pre-Christian sources as well as the natural world. Losh, who
was widely read and well-informed about contemporary debates on
‘natural theology’ and evolution, also incorporated images of fossil
ferns in the eastern windows, suggesting their presence at the dawn
of Creation.
Losh worked on the church herself, with members of her family
and local people. She carved the font. The lectern is by John Scott,
made from bog oak, and the building work was undertaken by the
mason William Hindson. In its use of individual craftsmen and in
the freedom of expression in the carving St Mary’s anticipated
Ruskin and the Arts and Crafts ideal. It is also a monument to the
spirit of an age poised between the Romantics and the Victorians.

Right: Mausoleum in churchyard of St Mary, Wreay. Photo: Paul Highnam

Below: St Mary, Wreay, view of apse. Photo: Paul Highnam

46
 Thomas Wynn, 1st Baron Newborough (1736–1807)
the lunatic fringe Thomas Wynn, 1st Baron Newborough, of Glynlliffon,
Some designs by amateurs could be exceedingly odd – the result Caernarvonshire, first travelled to Italy in 1759–60 where he is
of an untutored hand and unfettered imagination. There is more recorded as studying at the Turin Academy in 1759 with Thomas
than a little lunacy in Bunny Hall, the strange Baroque house built Robinson, Baron Grantham. In 1762 he designed the spectacular
by the wrestling parson Sir Thomas Parkyns in Nottinghamshire in house on the cliffs at Kingsgate, Kent, for Henry Fox, later Lord
1723; and Lord Holland designed Kingsgate on wildly grand scale, Holland, said to be a re-creation of Cicero’s Formian villa at Baiae,
surrounding it by a park and buildings drawn from the realms of although this was a literary comparison. It was certainly a reconstruc-
pure fantasy. tion of Pliny’s Laurentian villa. Its vast façade was 260 feet in length
with a huge hexastyle Doric portico opening to a vast neo-classical
Sir Thomas Parkyns (1662–1741) hall and two courtyards. In 1767 Holland wrote to his wife that ‘The
back part of the House looks now just like a Villa as I meant.’ There
Among the many talents of Sir Thomas Parkyns that included the
were 8 major rooms including a Saloon of Neptune. Initially
‘ability to throw a tenant, combat a paradox, quote Martial or sign a
Newborough had the assistance of John Vardy as executant. By 1782
mittimus with any man of his own age or county’, was architecture.
Newborough had gone broke owing to an obsession with the
A competent mathematician, with a knowledge of hydraulics and
Caernarvon Militia, fears of a French invasion, and the building at his
engineering, Parkyns was able at ‘Contriving & Drawing all his
expense of Forts Belan and Williamsburg on the Menai Straits. In
Planns without an Architect’. The inscription on his monument in
order to avoid creditors, in 1782 he fled to Italy with his wife, who died
Bunny church records that he ‘Built the Schoolhouse and Hospital
in Leghorn, and his son, ‘who was allowed to run wild’. He caused
. . . the Mannor Houses in Bunney and East Leake . . . the Vicaridge
consternation when he married Stella Chiappini, an ‘Italian singing
House & most of the Farm Houses in Bunney and Bradmore.’ Bunny
girl about 13 years old’, described as ‘wilder than a colt’, but who in
Hall, dated 1723, is one of the most eccentric houses in Britain, its
rebuff described him as a ‘stout old grey beard, from behind whose
front with a huge armorial achievement clasped by four whacky
few and discoloured teeth came forth an offensive breath’. She mar-
giant Ionic pilasters. It has quite rightly been described as ‘belonging
ried him in 1786, assuming the title of Countess. On his return to
to the lunatic fringe of the Baroque’, but it shares with the almshous-
England he designed the classical Temple of Friendship for Charles
es in the village a flavour of Low Countries Baroque. As the author
James Fox at St Anne’s Hill, Surrey, and may then have dotted the
of The Inn-Play, or, Cornish-Hugg Wrestler, 1727, dedicated to George II,
Kingsgate cliff-top with the most extraordinary and bizarre collection
Parkyns not only recommends wrestling as fostering military
of follies, including the Convent of St Mildrid, a ‘Tower built on the
strength against the French, but also hopes that Parliament ‘will
Highest spot in the Island in memory of Robert Whitfield Esq’, a
establish a stage in every market-town at which gentlemen wearing
Tower dedicated to ‘Thomas Harley, Ld Mayor of London, 1768’,
swords can settle their affronts at single-stick’. The annual wrestling
Countess’s Fort, and one titled ‘The Ornament and (under Thomas
competition at Bunny lasted from 1712 until 1810.
Wynn Esq) the Adorner of Kingsgate’, all engraved in bistre by Basire.

53 Thomas Wynn (engraved by Basire)

Kingsgate elevation and plan, 1768
Engraving (330 x 495)
Private Collection

54– 56 Thomas Wynn (engraved by Basire)

Designs for monuments, Kingsgate, Kent, 1768
Bistre engravings, (300 x 323; 340 x 245; 310 x 245)
Private Collection
53

Left: Bunny Hall, Nottinghamshire, by Sir Thomas Parkyns ‘one of the most
eccentric houses in Britain’. © Crown copyright.NMR

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