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Purpose
Signed and dated
- 1768
Notes
In the 1760s he engaged in land speculation in East Florida and the Isle of St John, in association with his cousin John Rutherford, receiver general of quit-rents in North Carolina, wo whom he had given a bond of £7,000. When Rutherford’s schemes failed, his creditors pressed Murray for payment, causing considerable financial distress. He went to America in 1769, settling in North Carolina, and succeeded in recouping most of his loses. He was resident in America for some years, but, as a loyalist, he then suffered various land losses. He then settled with his wife and daughters in Jamaica where he died in 1800.
In 1768, shortly before his emigration, John Murray commissioned James Adam to design a new house, and a greenhouse, possibly to replace the older Jacobean house at Philiphaugh. Neither was executed, presumably owing to Murray's financial distress. Murray had moved into his house at Philiphaugh when his more splendid house, the nearby Hangingshaw in Yarrowford, was destroyed by fire in the mid-1760s, and therefore, it is possible that Adam's designs may have been for the replacement of Hangingshaw rather than Philiphaugh. Although unexecuted, the importance of this design cannot be overstated as it is the only classical country house from the period of Robert and James Adam’s partnership (1763-92) that can be attributed entirely to James's authorship.
Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index pp. 26, 82; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume II, pp. 94, 132, 224; K. Crift, J. Dunbar, and R. Fawcett, The buildings of Scotland: Borders, 2006, p. 637; 'Murray, John (1726-1800) of Philipshaugh, Selkirk', The history of Parliament online
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).