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Purpose

Pall Mall, number 34 (later 25), London: executed designs for the house, for Andrew Millar, 1765-66 (11)

Signed and dated

  • 1765-66

Notes

Andrew Millar (1705-68), a subscriber to Adam's Ruins in 1767, was a bookseller. He first had a shop near St Clement's Church on the Strand, and later opposite Katherine Street. His business was established in 1728, and he is known to have published the work of Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson's dictionary, James Thomson's Seasons, David Hume and William Robertson's volumes on the history of Scotland, and Adam's print of the Admiralty Screen. Moreover, with the assistance of Patrick Murdock, Millar organised the publication of James Thomson’s collected works in order to fund a monument to Thomson, designed by Adam for Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey.

The bookshop was turned over to one of Millar's three apprentices, Thomas Cadell, in 1764. During his retirement Millar rebuilt his house at 34 Pall Mall to designs by Robert Adam. The house was built in accordance with the extant drawings. Millar moved into the house in December 1766, remaining there until his death in 1768. As none of his three children had survived infancy, on his death Millar's house and £60,000 fortune were inherited by his wife Jane Johnson (1710-88), the daughter of a Westminster printseller, whom he had married in 1730. Jane went on to marry Sir Archibald Grant in 1770.

According to the Survey of London, during the 1820s 34 Pall Mall was occupied by John Gibson Lockhart, the son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott, and in the 1830s by John Macdonald, the Adjutant General of Horse Guards. The house was demolished at an unknown date.

See also: The Admiralty Screen, Whitehall; Westminster Abbey, London: Monument to James Thomson

Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index pp. 43, 80; Survey of London, Volume 29, 1960, pp. 325-26; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume I, p. 264

Frances Sands, 2012

Level

Scheme

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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.

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Contents of Pall Mall, number 34 (later 25), London: executed designs for the house, for Andrew Millar, 1765-66 (11)