Browse
Purpose
Signed and dated
- c1761-65
Notes
It appears that following his appointment as Archbishop of York in 1761 Hay-Drummond sought to improve his local family seat at Brodsworth. Prior to 1761 he was elsewhere as Bishop of St Asaph and then Salisbury, and so the designs are unlikely to have been made earlier than this date. Adam's designs for Brodsworth comprise, first a total rebuilding of the old house which had been purchased by the 8th Earl in 1713, and second a more modest addition of a wing to the existing fabric. Work on Bishopthorpe Palace - the archbishop's official residence - also began when Hay-Drummond arrived in York, carried out by Thomas Atkinson (c1729-98) in 1763-69. Although Hay-Drummond clearly had grandiose plans for his private residence at Brodsworth, it would seem that the expense of the project at his official residence quickly took priority, and none of Adam's designs were executed.
The archbishop's eldest son, Robert, succeeded his uncle as the 10th Earl of Kinnoull, and Brodsworth was sold by the Kinnoull family at the end of the eighteenth century. The house was rebuilt in 1861-3 by Cavaliere Casentini of Lucca.
See also: Bishopthorpe Palace, North Yorkshire
Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index pp. 5, 92; N. Pevsner, and E. Radcliffe, The buildings of England: Yorkshire West Riding, 1967, p. 148; J. Ingamells, A dictionary of British and Irish travellers in Italy: 1701-1800, 1997, p. 477; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume II, p. 123; Yale, Horace Walpole's Correspondence, 2011, Volume 28, p. 316
Frances Sands, 2012
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).
Contents of Brodsworth Hall, South Yorkshire: unexecuted alternative designs for rebuilding, and enlarging the house for Archbishop Robert Hay-Drummond, c1761-65 (8)
- Designs and record drawings for a new house, c1761-65, unexecuted (5)
- Preliminary designs for a proposed addition to the house, c1761-65, unexecuted (3)