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Charlotte Street, number 8 (now 10 Bloomsbury Street), London: executed designs for a ceiling and frieze for Mr Lyte, 1773 (2)

Signed and dated

  • 1773

Notes

Mr Lyte is unknown. It is possible that he was Henry Lyte (1727-91), a fellow of Queens' College Cambridge in 1749-63, master of the robes and Privy Purse in 1780, and treasurer and secretary to the Prince of Wales in 1787, but this is pure speculation.

Moreover, there is some confusion about the accuracy of him being a patron of the Adam office. As shown by the surviving drawings - and an extant ceiling - the Adam office made designs for the drawing room at number 9 Charlotte Street. This was a pre-existing Georgian house of unknown origin for which Adam only made designs for interior decoration. As Mr Lyte is an unknown quantity it was suggested in the 1920s by Arthur Bolton that the inscription of Lyte's name on these two drawings was an error, and that they were intended for George Keate, another patron of the Adam office living on Charlotte Street. Keate, however, lived at number 9 Charlotte Street - being Lyte's neighbour - showing that they were two entirely separate patrons.

Lyte's house at number 8 Charlotte Street (now 10 Bloomsbury Street) survives, with Adam's ceiling intact, and is now used as offices.

Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1992, Volume II, Index pp. 36, 79; J. Ingamells, A dictionary of British and Irish travellers in Italy: 1701-1800, 1997, p. 618; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume I, pp. 307, 317

Frances Sands, 2013

Level

Scheme

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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Contents of Charlotte Street, number 8 (now 10 Bloomsbury Street), London: executed designs for a ceiling and frieze for Mr Lyte, 1773 (2)