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Purpose

Westminster Abbey, London: Monument to Mrs Mary Hope, commissioned by John Hope, c1767, as executed (1)

Signed and dated

  • 1767

Notes

John Hope (1739-85), the son of Hon. Charles Hope Weir, was a wealthy London merchant and MP for Linlithgowshire in 1768-70. In 1762 he married Mary, daughter of Eliab Breton of Enfield with whom he had three sons. On Mary's death in 1767, Hope commissioned Robert Adam to design her funerary monument. The executed monument is located in the south transept of Westminster Abbey - not Mary's burial place of Norton Church, Northamptonshire, as suggested by Bolton - and follows Adam's simple design exactly.

There are six monuments by Robert Adam in Westminster Abbey, those commemorating: John André, William Dalrymple, Mary Hope, the Duchess of Northumberland, James Thomson and Roger Townshend.

Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 24; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume I, pp. 263, 267; 'Hope, John (1739-85), of Craigiehall, Linlithgow', in History of Parliament online

Frances Sands, 2011

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.

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Contents of Westminster Abbey, London: Monument to Mrs Mary Hope, commissioned by John Hope, c1767, as executed (1)