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On 28 April 1774 Price married Lady Caroline Carpenter, the daughter of George, 1st Earl of Tyrconnel. Together they had one son, Robert (d. 1857) and one daughter, Caroline (d. 1853).
In 1784 he was elected to the Society of Dilettanti. He also held several positions in his local Herefordshire, including the post of sheriff from 1793 and that of deputy surveyor of the Forest of Dean from 1816. He was an active member on several Hereford committees, and was instrumental in the commissioning of architect John Nash to design the county’s new goal in 1796.
In February 1828 he was created a baronet at the age of 81.
Uvedale Price was a passionate landscape gardener and theorist, publishing his controversial ‘Essays on the Picturesque’ in 1794. Here Price, like his friend Richard Payne Knight, criticised the flat landscapes made so popular by Capability Brown and actively promoted rugged and overgrown woodlands and hills.
‘Essays on the Picturesque’ proved hugely influential, and Price developed his estate at Foxley in accordance with his theories. The estate’s substantial alteration was begun under Price’s father Robert, who was assisted by his friend Benjamin Stillingfleet. Following his inheritance Uvedale Price expanded the estate considerably with additional lands acquired from nearby Mansell Lacy, Yazor and Ladylift. By 1775 the estate consisted of 3537 acres and produced an annual income of £2461. Price introduced several elements to Foxley to reflect his ideal, including alterations to the wooded valley landscape. As a result Foxley’s landscape attracted many visitors and admirers who came to gain an appreciation of Price’s ‘picturesque’.
Price died at Foxley 14 September, 1829 and was buried in the churchyard at Yazor in a simple tomb erected in his memory. Price’s friend the young poet Elizabeth Barrett wrote ‘To the memory of Sir Uvedale Price, Bart’ in his honour.
Adam’s c1771 designs for a wall treatment and a ceiling of a hall for Uvedale Price do not record its intended location. As a result, Bolton catalogues the scheme as site unknown. However it seems probable that the designs were intended for Price’s manor house at Foxley where Adam is recorded as making internal alterations c1772. As the date for the designs coincides with the work undertaken for Price it is possible that the scheme was executed.
Dating to 1717, Foxley House was altered in the late eighteenth century and again in the nineteenth century. The house was eventually demolished in 1948. The estate of Foxley first came into the Price family in 1679 with the marriage of heiress Ann Rodd to Robert Price. In 1855 the estate was sold to John Davenport and it remained within the Davenport family until the late twentieth century.
Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index pp. 84, 57; ‘Uvedale Price’, www.britishmuseum.org; ‘An Essay on the Picturesque by Uvedale Price. 1794 – RCIN 1151382, www.rct.uk; D. Whitehead, ‘Price, Sir Uvedale, first baronet (1747-1829)’, September 2004, www.oxforddnb.com; ‘Foxley’, www.historicengland.org.uk (accessed March 2021)
Anna McAlaney, 2021
Level
Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.
Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).