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- 1807-08
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'Mr Rowles' was Henry Rowles (died 1841), a successful builder and the nephew of Henry Holland. Dorothy Stroud (Henry Holland, 1966) wrote that 'a plan of 1796 ... gives the name of "Holland" and "Rowles" against Nos 142 and 143' (p.134). Rowles was the son of Holland's sister Catherine and on his marriage in 1804 was granted a lease by his uncle of 12 houses in Upper Cadogan Place, the largest of which (no. 13) he occupied (p.48). On Holland's death in 1806 Rowles received his collection of 'Antique remains in plaister and marble' and his architectural books and drawings. Apparently he had little regard for these, allowing the office papers to be destroyed. Soane, some years later, acquired the splendid collection of marbles (pp.151-2).
See also [SM D4/10/39].
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).