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- 1766-67
Fife House had been substantially altered, or rebuilt, for the 2nd Earl in 1756-57 to designs by John Woolfe (d.1793). Then in 1766 Adam was employed to make designs for the interior, executing unidentified designs he made for the great room. The 2nd Earl's maternal uncle was Sir Ludovic Grant, 6th Baronet, who had been Adam's patron at Moy House, Moray in 1759. It may have been through this connection that Adam came to the 2nd Earl's attention.
In 1809 repairs and alterations were made to Fife House by John Soane (1753-1837), and the house was demolished in 1869.
Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, index pp. 51, 71; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume I, p. 423; 'Duff, Hon. James (1729-1809), of Duff House, Banff. And Mar Lodge, Aberdeen', History of Parliament online
Frances Sands, 2012
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 Fife House, Whitehall, London: designs for interior decoration, for James Duff, 2nd Earl of Fife, 1766-67 (4)
- Preliminary design, design, and record drawing for the ceiling of the great room, 1766, drawing 3 as executed (3)
- Design for a wall panel in the upper portion of an arched recess, 1767 (1)