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Blunham House, Blunham, Bedfordshire: survey drawings and interior decorative designs for Colonel John Campbell, 1768-69 (9)

Signed and dated

  • 1768-69

Notes

Blunham House (now Blunham Court) was built in c1727-30 for Thomas Bromsall (d 1750). Following the death of his widow, Bromsall left Blunham to a cousin, John Orlebar, who sold the estate to Colonel John Campbell (d 1773) in 1768 for £4,300. Little is known about Campbell, but on his death the estate passed to his son, also John, and then to his grandson, who sold the estate in 1835 to Sir Peter Payne, the Bedfordshire reformer. The house remains in domestic usage.

Immediately on his purchase of Blunham, Campbell commissioned Robert Adam to make survey drawings of the house, and designs for a new interior decorative scheme. Some, but not all of Adam’s proposed decoration was carried out, but nothing survives owing to substantial alterations during the nineteenth century.

Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, index pp. 4, 65; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume II, p. 179; British listed buildings online: 'Blunham Court, Blunham House, Blunham'; Bedfordshire Borough Council website, Community and living archives: 'Blunham Court'

Frances Sands, 2013

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 Blunham House, Blunham, Bedfordshire: survey drawings and interior decorative designs for Colonel John Campbell, 1768-69 (9)