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Purpose
Signed and dated
- 1764
Notes
In 1743 Robert Henley married Jane, daughter of Sir John Hubbard, 2nd Baronet of Ipsley, Warwickshire. He served as MP for Bath in 1747-57; he was knighted in 1756, and appointed Attorney General in that year; he was then made Lord Keeper of the Great Seal in 1757-61 which was attended by appointments to the Privy Council and the Cabinet; he was created Baron Henley in 1760; he served as Lord High Steward for the trials of Lord Ferrers in 1760, and Lord Byron in 1765; he was Lord Chancellor in 1761-66; he was created Earl of Northington in 1764; he was Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire in 1764-71; and he was Lord President of the Council in 1766-67.
Through his political career Henley was particular friends with George Bubb Doddington (created Baron Melcombe in 1761), who had employed Robert Adam to make unexecuted designs for a garden pavilion at La Trappe, Hammersmith in 1762. It may have been through Bubb Doddington that Adam came to Henley’s attention.
Following the death of the 2nd Lord Henley in 1786 the Grange was sold to the banker, Henry Drummond, whose grandson, also Henry Drummond, encased the old house in the form of a Greek temple in c1809-10 to designs by William Wilkins (1778-1839). Drummond sold the house in 1816 and during the nineteenth century various additions were made for the banking family the Barings, by Sir Robert Smirke (1780-1867), Charles Robert Cockerell (1788-1863) Frederick Pepys Cockerell (1833-78), and John Cox (dates unknown). The interior of the house was stripped in 1975, and parts of the house were demolished, but the shell was saved by the Department of the Environment (now English Heritage). The Grange is now the home of the Grange Park Opera, but the majority of the house remains a roofed shell, revealing much of Samwell's original house underneath Wilkins's additions.
Literature:
A. T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index pp. 15, 74; J. Geddes, ‘The Prince of Wales at the Grange, Northington: an inventory of 1795’, Furniture History XXII, 1986, pp. 176-78, 203-6; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume II, p. 218; M. Bullen, J. Crooke, R. Hubbuck, and N. Pevsner, The buildings of England: Hampshire: Winchester and the north, 2010, pp. 296-98; R.R. Sedgwick, 'Henley, Robert (c1708-72), of the Grange, nr. Alresford, Hants', The history of Parliament online, 2012; R. Osborne, The Grange, Hampshire, 2012
Frances Sands, 2012
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 The Grange, Hampshire: unexecuted designs for domestic offices and a bridge for the 1st Lord Henley, 1764 (5)
- Finished drawings, and alternative design for the kitchen offices, 1764 (4)
- Unfinished design for a bridge, 1764, unexecuted (1)