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Purpose
Signed and dated
- 1764
Notes
In 1763 Lord Holland purchased a seventeenth-century house on Piccadilly for £16,000. Robert Adam was commissioned to produced designs for rebuilding a year later, in 1764, including a screen wall and gate to the front. None of these designs were executed, most likely as Holland's political career was coming to an end, and his building efforts were concentrated on his country house at Kingsgate, Kent. The house was sold after only eight years of ownership, in 1771, to Sir Peniston Lamb (1745-1828) for £16,500. Sir Peniston, who was created 1st Viscount Melbourne in 1772, immediately rebuilt the house to designs by Sir William Chambers (1722-96). Melbourne House was complete in 1774, and is now the Albany.
The only record of Adam's unexecuted seven-bay house for the site can be seen in a copy made by Sir William Chambers, and preserved in Sir John Soane's Museum (SM 17/7/4-5). The only extant Adam drawing at the Soane Museum for the scheme shows a 100 foot screen wall and gateway, of which there is a variant preliminary version in the V&A Museum.
See also: Kingsgate (or Old Holland House), Broadstairs, Kent
Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index pp. 45, 75; F.H.W. Sheppard, (ed.)., Survey of London, Volume 32, 1963, p. 369; A. Rowan, Robert Adam: catalogue of architectural drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1988, p. 60; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume II, p. 130; 'Fox, Henry (1705-74), of Holland House, Kensington', 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).