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Purpose
Signed and dated
- c1761
Notes
On succeeding his father as 2nd Earl in 1761, Shelburne commissioned Robert Adam to made additions and alterations to the family seat at Bowood, Wiltshire. At around the same time he also acquired a plot of land at Hyde Park Corner (the site of 145-146 Piccadilly) with the intention of building himself a townhouse. This was presumably motivated by Shelburne’s numerous public activities regularly bringing him to London. For this too, Adam was commissioned to make designs, and the extant drawings show a Greek cross-shaped house, with an elliptical court at the front, and a service wing to the rear. This house was not executed, and instead Shelburne purchased the shell of a new house on Berkeley Square in 1765. This alternative house came to be known as Lansdowne House, but had been begun to designs by Adam in 1762 for Lord Bute. As a condition of the sale Adam continued his work on the house, and although still incomplete, Shelburne took up residence in 1768. Lansdowne House was largely demolished in 1929.
See also: Bowood,Calne, Wiltshire; Lansdowne House, Berkeley Square, London.
Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index pp. 45, 87; J. Ingamells, A dictionary of British and Irish travellers in Italy: 1701-1800, 1997, p. 852; F. Russell, ‘The house that became a hostage’, Country Life, 29 October 1998, pp. 65-67; E. Harris, The genius of Robert Adam: his interiors, 2001, pp. 114-115; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume II, pp. 129-130; S. Bradley, and N. Pevsner, The buildings of England: London 6: Westminster, 2003, p. 498; L. Namier, ‘Petty, William, Visct. Fitzmaurice (1737-1805), of Bowood, Wilts.’, History of Parliament online
Frances Sands, 2014
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).