Tortworth Court (Gloucestershire): unexecuted designs for a pair of gate lodges in a Castle style for Lord Ducie and design for a prospect tower 1796 (12)

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Tortworth Court (Gloucestershire): unexecuted designs for a pair of gate lodges in a Castle style for Lord Ducie and design for a prospect tower 1796 (12)

Notes

Alternative designs for twin lodges were made for Francis-Reynolds-Moreton, 3rd Baron Ducie (1739-1808) in November and December of 1796. The office Journal 3 records that one site visit was made (30th October to 2nd November), four designs were sent by post on 15 November and another two designs on 2nd December. The office Ledger D shows that Ducie was charged £20.6.0 for the visit and £6.6.0 for the drawings, a total of £26.12.0 and it must be assumed that none of the designs were carried out.
This was not the first scheme designed by Soane in a Castle style. The domestic offices at Skelton Castle (1790-1) had embattled walls and his alternative designs for Dunninald House included two sets of designs in a Castle style (q.q.v). More successful were the embattled stables at Port Eliot, 1804.
Of 'the old Tortworth Court ... All that survives is a ruined fragment'. (D.Verey and A. Brooks, Gloucestershire 2: the Vale and Forest of Dean, 2002, pp.772-3. The new Tortworth Court was built 1849-53 by S.S.Teulon (1812-73) who also designed the SW lodge.

There are in the Soane Museum's green box files under Tortworth two (indistinct) photo copies of photographs (Conway L12/20(19) and L12/20/(18) of two designs for a gate house. These were sold at Christies, 30 November 1983, lot no.81. One (18) is the same as drawing [7], the other has alternative designs of which the right hand one also relates to drawing [7] while the left hand design is the same as drawing [9].

For a note on another drawing sold at the same sale see drawing [12] for Soane's design for a prospect tower for Lord Ducie

A design for a 'Prospect House', c.1796 in in the Victoria & Albert Museum see P.du Prey, Sir John Soane, 1985, in series of 'Catalogues of architectural drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum', catalogue 118, pp.57-58

Jill Lever
April 2015

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Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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 Tortworth Court (Gloucestershire): unexecuted designs for a pair of gate lodges in a Castle style for Lord Ducie and design for a prospect tower 1796 (12)