Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  London: Hereford Street, Grosvenor Square, Westminster: unexecuted designs for the Society of Dilettanti and for a library for Lord Camelford, 1784-1785 (2)

Browse

Purpose

London: Hereford Street, Grosvenor Square, Westminster: unexecuted designs for the Society of Dilettanti and for a library for Lord Camelford, 1784-1785 (2)

Signed and dated

  • 1784
    Main Year
  • 1785
    Other Years

Notes

The client was Thomas Pitt (1737-1793) nephew of the first Earl of Chatham (see Design for the Chatham mausoleum, 1778) and cousin to William Pitt the Younger (Prime Minister, 1783). Created Baron Camelford in 1784, Thomas Pitt was an amateur architect who befriended Soane during his Italian tour. That Soane did work work for him at Camelford House (on a site running from Oxford Street to North Row and built in about 1773-4) is confirmed by a letter sent to Pitt by Soane from Milan (dated August 1779) that mentions previous discussions about altering Pitt’s London townhouse, a sketch of which had been enclosed (SM ‘Original Sketches’ volume 42/182). Soane also worked on three of Thomas Pitt’s country properties: Petersham Lodge, Surrey, repairs and decorations, 1781-2; Westgate House, Burnham Market, Norfolk, additions and alterations, 1783 and Boconnoc, Cornwall, alterations and repairs, 1786 though none relates to a library. Pitt had already added a library and picture gallery to Boconnoc in 1772 (Colvin).

Thomas Pitt also owned two adjacent houses on the south side of Hereford Street near to his town house. Bought as a speculation in the form of unfinished shells, he considered offering them to the Society of Dilettanti (of which he was elected a member in 1763) as their headquarters. Soane enthusiastically worked up a scheme for which he exhibited a drawing at the Royal Academy in 1784, ‘Design for a museum’ (see No.1). This was later engraved and published as plates 46 and 47 in Soane’s Plans, elevations and sections of buildings (1789). The design for a library for Lord Camelford (No.2) may be for the same site in Hereford Street since though different in design the dimensions (52 by 20 feet) correspond with the larger of the three library rooms shown in No.1. A comparison shows that the latter has five windows and not three, and that the room is entered from adjacent library rooms and not from a short end wall as in the drawing No.2. Still, given the site, Soane’s design of February 1785 could have worked and, of course, the patron for both schemes is the same.
See also Volume 42/135: London: Bath house for (?) Thomas Pitt at Hereford Street, London, c.1779


Jill Lever, February 2006

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 London: Hereford Street, Grosvenor Square, Westminster: unexecuted designs for the Society of Dilettanti and for a library for Lord Camelford, 1784-1785 (2)