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The drawings catalogued here are dated between October 1797 and April 1799 and were drawn by George Mansfield, Soane's surveyor. The work was carried out for the
Dowager Countess of Pembroke (1737-1831) widow of the tenth Earl, and lady of the bedchamber to the Queen Consort. Soane had earlier (for the same client) made alterations in three phases to Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park, 1788-98 (q.v.). Lady Pembroke moved into her Grosvenor Square house in 1799. The alterations cost £2,189. The most ambitious (though unrealised) of Soane's designs ([7]) was for moving the ground floor library forward into the garden and adding rooms behind. In the main, the work consisted of new and larger windows to rooms on the first floor, doors were generally moved, widened and centred so as to create enfilades and new chimneypieces were installed. Lady Pembroke did not stay long in Grosvenor Square, moving out in 1801. The new owner was Robert Knight who employed Soane to make further and larger alterations (q.v.).
Litererature. Survey of London, The Grosvenor Estate in Mayfar, volume XL, pp.161-162
'Grosvenor Square: Individual Houses built before 1926', in Survey of London: Volume 40, the Grosvenor Estate in Mayfair, Part 2 (The Buildings), ed. F H W Sheppard (London, 1980), pp. 117-166 http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol40/pt2/pp117-166
Jill Lever
May 2015
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 London: No. 49 (formerly 44) Grosvenor Square: alterations for the Dowager Countess of Pembroke, 1797-9 (18)
- Survey and design drawings, 1797-8 (10)
- Details of mouldings, windows and chimney pieces, 1798-9 (8)