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You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  England: Surrey: Richmond Gardens. Revised design for Queen Caroline's Hermitage in Richmond Gardens, showing a small three-bay grotto or hermitage of rusticated work, with double pediments and small campanile to one side, in a formal woodland setting. In the foreground is a satyr kissing the hand of a lady, and in pencil a plan of of five columns.
  • image Adam vol.56/25
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Reference number

Adam vol.56/25

Purpose

England: Surrey: Richmond Gardens. Revised design for Queen Caroline's Hermitage in Richmond Gardens, showing a small three-bay grotto or hermitage of rusticated work, with double pediments and small campanile to one side, in a formal woodland setting. In the foreground is a satyr kissing the hand of a lady, and in pencil a plan of of five columns.

Aspect

Perspective

Scale

17/8 ins to 10 ft

Inscribed

Lettered in the drawingin ink Arcadia, and inscribed in red ink 25

Signed and dated

  • Undated, 1730

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, brown and grey washes304 x 462

Hand

William Kent

Watermark

IV

Notes

This is the revised design for Queen Caroline's Hermitage in Richmond Gardens, Surrey made by William Kent in 1730. Adam vol.56/33-35 shows a more architectural version of the design, which is closer to Kent's engraving of 1738, inscribed 'View of the Hermitage/ in the Royal Garden at Richmond'. The lintel above the keystone of the central arch has the inscription 'Arcadia'. A section of the grotto is reproduced in Dixon Hunt William Kent, Landscape Garden Designer (London, 1987), p.62, pl.29. According to Fleming, Robert Adam visited Richmond Gardens in 1750 and '... took a plan of the Queen's hermitage by Morris ...' (Fleming Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome (London, 1962), p.85). The reference to 'Morris' is probably to Roger (d.1749) rather than Robert Morris, who Adam knew through his work at Inveraray Castle, Argyll, Scotland. The Adam family worked there between 1745 and 1760. There is a view of this grotto at Blair Adam, and also a small plan and elevation of the hermitage in Adam's sketchbook of 1749-50 in the RIBA (see Catalogue of the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Gregg International Publishers Ltd, 1968), p.17, fig.15). Alternatively, Adam may have acquired this drawing and Adam 56/33-35 when he became Royal Architect in 1761, and had access to the drawings for royal buildings.

Literature

Rep. Dixon Hunt 'William Kent and the Theatre', Kunstlicht, 16 (Amsterdam, 1985), pl.1C M Sicca 'Like a shallow cave by nature made, William Kent's natural architecture at Richmond', Architectura (Munich, 1986), vol.16, pp.68-82, fig.6 Dixon Hunt William Kent, Landscape Garden Designer (London, 1987), cat.70 Richardson, ed. Soane: Connoisseur & Collector, catalogue of an exhibition at Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 1995, cat.14William Kent 1685-1748, A Poet on Paper (London, 1998), catalogue of an exhibition at Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 1998, cat.29.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Soane: Connoisseur & Collector, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 6 April - 2 September 1995; The Frick Collection, New York, 30 April - 7 July 1996
William Kent 1685-1748: A Poet on Paper, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 30 October - 19 December 1998
A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits and Solitude in Art, The Holburne Museum, Bath, 16 April - 2 June 2002
The Adam Brothers in Rome: Drawings from the Grand Tour, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 25 September 2008 - 14 February 2009
William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain, Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York, 19 September 2013 - 16 February 2014; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 22 March - 13 July 2014
Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte, and the Shaping of the Modern World, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 2 February - 30 April 2017

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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