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Notes
The portraits by Gainsborough were completed in 1777 and were exhibited at the Royal Academy that same year. They reassert the Cumberlands’ status, with both shown wearing robes of state and with coronets prominently featured. Adam’s design echoes this ducal display, with the inclusion of pelmets, coronets, trophies and royal supporters.
A clause within Lady Home’s Will expressed a wish that upon her death the portraits be bequeathed to the ‘Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Commonality of the City of London’, to be displayed in ‘the Mansion House, London’. There was, however, a codicil allowing for return of the paintings to the Cumberlands, if they so wished. The Duke and Duchess, it seems, exercised this right and when the Duchess died in 1809 she left the portraits to the Duke of Clarence, her nephew by marriage and the future William IV. The paintings were first recorded as part of the Royal collection in the 1840s, where they were probably incorporated after the death of William IV. Within the collection they were previously known to have plain moulded frames and were fitted with their current ones in the 20th century.
In her Will the Countess of Home records the portraits as hanging in her ‘Capital Room’. The second drawing room is accepted as the most fitting location for the portraits, and it is likely that they were displayed to either side of the chimneypiece.
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).