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Purpose
Signed and dated
- 1768
Notes
The Killerton estate had been in the ownership of the Acland family since the early seventeenth century, but the house and park were not planned until the 1770s, by Sir Thomas Acland Dyke. There had been an older house, although it was completely rebuilt in the 1770s. According to Pevsner all that survives of this older structure is a date stone of 1680. Robert Adam's designs for the house at Killerton, as well as designs by James Wyatt (1746-1813), were rejected in favour of those by John Johnson (1732-1814), and the house was erected in 1778-79. Although the house has been altered since its construction in the 1770s, the estate remained in the ownership of the Acland family until 1944, when it was given to the National Trust.
Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index pp. 19, 60; B. Cherry and N. Pevsner, The buildings of England: Devon, 1989, p. 518; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume II, pp. 79, 127; 'Acland, Sir Thomas Dyke, 7th Bt. (1722-85), of Killerton, Devon and Holnicote, Som.' and 'Acland, Sir Thomas Dyke, 7th Bt. (1722-85), of Killerton, Devon, and Holnicote, Som', History of Parliament online, 2012
Frances Sands, 2012
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).