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St James's Square, number unknown, London: unexecuted designs for a ceiling and frieze for Mr Hamilton, 1772 (2)

Signed and dated

  • 1772

Notes

St James's Square was developed by Henry Jermyn, Earl of St Albans following the Restoration in 1660. St Albans leased plots for speculative builders to erect individual houses. It was a convenient location for aristocrats with duties at St James's Palace, and soon became the most fashionable address in town. Most of the houses were rebuilt during the eighteenth century, but it became less fashionable during the nineteenth century when the square was populated by wealthy tradesmen and clubs rather than aristocrats. None of the houses in the square remain residential, and are mainly used as offices.

These drawings show designs for a ceiling and frieze for an unknown house on St James's Square. They are not known to have been executed, and the patron, Mr Hamilton, is also unknown. Arthur Bolton has suggested that he may have been John Hamilton of Bargeny who was a subscriber to Adam's publication The ruins of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia.

See also: St Martin's Lane, number unknown designs for mirrors for Mr Hamilton

Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index pp. 49, 74; B. Weinreb, and C. Hibbert, The London encyclopaedia, 1983, p. 740; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume II, p. 181

Frances Sands, 2013

Level

Scheme

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

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 St James's Square, number unknown, London: unexecuted designs for a ceiling and frieze for Mr Hamilton, 1772 (2)