Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Foley House, Portland Place, London: unexecuted design for a ceiling for Thomas Foley, 2nd Baron Foley, by an unknown architect, 1762 (1)

Browse

Purpose

Foley House, Portland Place, London: unexecuted design for a ceiling for Thomas Foley, 2nd Baron Foley, by an unknown architect, 1762 (1)

Signed and dated

  • 1762

Notes

Foley House was built by Stiff Leadbetter (d1766) for Thomas Foley, 2nd Baron Foley of Kidderminster (1703-66) in c1754-62. It was around Foley House in the 1770s that the Adam brothers arranged Portland Place, the widest contemporary street in London. The width of Portland Place was conditioned by the breadth of Foley House as Lord Foley did not want any of the windows on the north front of his house to be obscured. The Adams had intended Portland Place to be a piazza of urban mansions, enclosed at the southern end by Foley House, and overlooking the fields of Marylebone Farm at the northern end. Owing to the financial constraints caused by the American War of Independence it became instead a street of townhouses.

There is a ceiling design for Foley House, datable to 1762, in the Adam drawings collection, and although it makes use of neo-classical motifs, it is highly uncharacteristic of Adam's oeuvre. According to Bolton it 'cannot be Adam'. It is possible that this design is by Stiff Leadbetter, the architect of Foley House, who did not die until c1766, but it does not make use of his characteristic scale bar, and as such it is difficult to attribute authorship. As far as is known Robert Adam did not make any contribution to Foley House itself.

The 2nd Baron Foley died unmarried and intestate, and his estate passed to his cousin Thomas Foley of Stoke Edith. Foley House was demolished in c1815, and the site is now occupied by the Langham Hotel.

See also: Stoke Edith, Herefordshire

Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, pp. 102-3, Index pp. 45, 71; J. Lees-Milne, The age of Adam, 1947, p. 37; D. Yarwood, Robert Adam, 1970, p. 164; B. Weinreb, and C. Hibbert, The London Encyclopaedia, 1983, p. 633; B. Cherry, and N. Pevsner, The buildings of England: London 3: north west, 1991, p. 647

Frances Sands, 2012

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 Foley House, Portland Place, London: unexecuted design for a ceiling for Thomas Foley, 2nd Baron Foley, by an unknown architect, 1762 (1)