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Purpose

Dover Street, number unknown, London: unexecuted designs for interior decoration for Dr Richard Warren, 1775-76 (8)

Signed and dated

  • 1775-76

Notes

Dr Richard Warren FRS, FSA (1731-97), was the third son of Revd Dr Richard Warren, archdeacon of Suffolk, and rector of Cavendish in the same county. He acquired his MD in 1762, first working as a tutor at Jesus College, Cambridge to the son of Dr Peter Shaw, physician-in-ordinary to King George II and King George III. Warren married Shaw's daughter, Elizabeth in 1759, and succeeded him as physician-in-ordinary to George III in 1763. In the same year Warren was also elected as a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. He also worked at the Middlesex and St George's hospitals. By the 1780s he was the most fashionable society physician of the time, and during George III's illness of 1788 he earned a considerable fortune.

Warren lived on Dover Street, London, where he died in 1797, and it was presumably for this house that he commissioned Robert Adam in 1775-76 to make designs for interior decoration. The surviving drawings show designs for a ceiling, frieze and mirror frame for the drawing room, and lamps for the eating room and staircase. None of these designs are known to have been executed.

Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index pp. 58, 90; E. Harris, The furniture of Robert Adam, 1963, Index p. 59; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume II, p. 179; Oxford dictionary of national biography online: 'Warren, Richard (1731-97)'

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 Dover Street, number unknown, London: unexecuted designs for interior decoration for Dr Richard Warren, 1775-76 (8)