Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Possibly Methven Castle, Perth and Kinross: design for a Doric alcove and seat for David Smythe, Lord Methven, ND, executed status unknown (1)

Browse

Purpose

Possibly Methven Castle, Perth and Kinross: design for a Doric alcove and seat for David Smythe, Lord Methven, ND, executed status unknown (1)

Notes

David Smythe (1746-1806) was a Scottish judge who was later appointed to Commissioner of Justiciary. He was the only son of David Smythe, 9th of Braco, 3rd of Methven Castle. He became an advocate in 1769, served as Sheriff-Depute from 1786-93, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1788, and was raised to the bench in 1793, taking the title Lord Methven. He married Elizabeth Murray in 1772 and had three sons and four daughters. After her death in 1785, he married Euphemia Murray, whose beauty was the subject of one of Robert Burns’s songs, and had two sons and two daughters. His surviving son from his first marriage succeeded to the Methven estate upon his death followed by his eldest son of his second marriage.

The Adam office made a design for a Greek Doric alcove and seat for ‘Mr Baron Smyth’. The drawing is undated and the location for the proposed seat is unknown, however, Bolton suggests it was probably for his residence at Methven Castle.

Literature: A.T. Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, Volume II, Index, 1922, p. 57; D. King, The Complete Works of Robert and James Adam and Unbuilt Adam, Volume 2, 2001, p. 227; A. H. Millar, ‘Smythe, David, Lord Methven (1746–1806)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online [accessed 06 November 2023]

Louisa Catt, 2023

Level

Scheme

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

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).  


Contents of Possibly Methven Castle, Perth and Kinross: design for a Doric alcove and seat for David Smythe, Lord Methven, ND, executed status unknown (1)