Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Curzon Street, number 30, Westminster: designs for interior decoration, furniture and plate for the Hon. Henry Frederick Thynne, 1771-73 (18)

Browse

Purpose

Curzon Street, number 30, Westminster: designs for interior decoration, furniture and plate for the Hon. Henry Frederick Thynne, 1771-73 (18)

Signed and dated

  • 1771-73

Notes

The Hon. Henry Frederick Thynne (1735-1826) was the second son of Thomas, 2nd Viscount Weymouth, by his second wife, the Hon. Louisa Carteret, daughter of the 2nd Earl Granville. He served as MP for Staffordshire in 1757-61, and Weobley in 1761-70, as well as clerk comptroller of the Board of Green Cloth in 1762-65, master of the Household in 1768-70, and joint Postmaster General in 1770-89. In 1776 Thynne succeeded to the estates of his maternal uncle, the 3rd Earl Granville, took the name Carteret, and was created Baron Carteret in 1784. In 1810 he married Eleanor Smart, who had previously been his mistress for 43 years. Together they had one illegitimate son and Thynne was succeeded by his nephew.

Thynne lived at 30 Curzon Street. From 1715 the land formerly known at Great Brookfield came into the possession of Sir Nathaniel Curzon of Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire. Curzon Street was developed between the early 1720s and the 1790s. Number 30 was built in 1750-55 by an unknown architect. It is a six-bay house, being four storeys over a sunk basement, with a rusticated ground storey, alternating triangular and segmental pediments over the first-storey windows, and with a single-bay Doric porch over the ground-storey front door, which is off centre in the fifth bay. Thynne gave the house new interior decoration in 1771-73 to designs by Robert Adam. Thynne’s brother, the 3rd Viscount Weymouth was married to Lady Elizabeth Cavendish-Bentinck, the eldest daughter of the 2nd Duke of Portland, Adam’s patron for the unexecuted designs for Portland House, New Cavendish Street, London in c1770. It may have been through this connection with his sister-in-law’s family that Thynne came to be acquainted with Adam.

At 30 Curzon Street, Adam made designs for interior decoration, plate and furniture, including his magnificent segmentally vaulted drawing room, with plasterwork by Joseph Rose, which survives on the first storey at the front of the house. Adam’s interior decoration to the entrance hall also survives, and there are other twentieth-century Adam-imitation interiors within the house. 30 Curzon Street has been the location of the private members’ gaming club, Crockford’s, since 1983.

Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, index pp. 36, 89; E. Harris, The furniture of Robert Adam, 1963, Index pp. 54, 98; B. Weinreb, and C. Hibbert, The London encyclopaedia, 1983, p. 224; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume I, pp. 307, 315-317; S. Bradley, and N. Pevsner, The buildings of England: London 6: Westminster, 2003, pp. 517-519; ‘City of Westminster, Curzon Street’, British listed buildings online; ‘Thynne, Hon. Henry Frederick (1735-1826), of Compsford, Glos.’ History of Parliament online

Frances Sands, 2014

Level

Scheme

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

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

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 Curzon Street, number 30, Westminster: designs for interior decoration, furniture and plate for the Hon. Henry Frederick Thynne, 1771-73 (18)