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Piccadilly, number 15 (later number 138-139), London: unexecuted designs for a drawing room ceiling and a frieze for the 2rd Earl of March and Ruglen, 1774 (2)

Signed and dated

  • 1774

Notes

William Douglas, 3rd Earl of March and Ruglen, later 4th Duke of Queensberry (1725-1810), succeeded his father, the 2nd Earl of March, in 1731; his mother, the Countess of Ruglen, in 1748; and his cousin, the 3rd Duke of Queensberry, in 1778. In 1748 he became a member of the Society of Dilettanti, and established himself in London, attending the House of Lords regularly, and becoming a man of fashion, an expert horseman, a successful gambler and ladies' man, and a lover of the opera.

The 3rd Earl also served as a Lord of the Bedchamber in 1761-89; he was a Scottish representative peer from 1761-1810; Vice-Admiral of Scotland in 1767-76; First Lord of the Police in 1776-82; and Lord Lieutenant of Dumfriesshire in 1794. Besides this he was made a Knight of the Thistle in 1763; an English peer as Baron Douglas of Amesbury in 1786; and in the 1790s he was a great supporter of aristocratic refugees of the French Revolution. He died unmarried, leaving the majority of his vast fortune to his illegitimate daughter, Maria Emily Seymour-Conway, Marchioness of Hertford.

15 Piccadilly was built for the 3rd Earl of March in c1760-64 to designs by Matthew Brettingham (1699-1769), and in 1774 Robert Adam was commissioned to make designs for the interior decorative scheme of the first drawing room. The surviving drawings show the unexecuted designs for the ceiling and frieze. It is not known why these designs were not executed. The house (now numbered 138-139) was rebuilt in the nineteenth century to designs by Ralph Selden Wornum (1847-1910).

Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, index pp. 45, 80; J. Ingamells, A dictionary of British and Irish travellers in Italy: 1701-1800, 1997, p. 640; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume II, p. 179; S. Bradley, and N. Pevsner, The buildings of England: London 6: Westminster, 2003, pp. 556-57; Oxford dictionary of national biography online: 'Douglas, William, fourth duke of Queensberry (1725-1810)'

Frances Sands, 2013

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 Piccadilly, number 15 (later number 138-139), London: unexecuted designs for a drawing room ceiling and a frieze for the 2rd Earl of March and Ruglen, 1774 (2)