Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Littlecote, Ramsbury, Wiltshire: unexecuted design for a garden pavilion for General Edward Popham, 1768 (1)

Browse

Purpose

Littlecote, Ramsbury, Wiltshire: unexecuted design for a garden pavilion for General Edward Popham, 1768 (1)

Signed and dated

  • 1768

Notes

Parts of Littlecote date back to the thirteenth century, although the principal (south) front is Elizabethan. It passed into the Popham family in 1589. General Edward Popham (d. 1780), had served as MP for Wiltshire (1741-47 and 1751-61), and was the owner of Littlecote when James Adam made an unexecuted design for a garden pavilion. It is possible that Popham had been introduced to the Adam brothers through their mutual acquaintance the Duke of Northumberland. This drawing for a pavilion is the only known Adam design made for Littlecote. It may have been an unsuccessful speculative venture. The house was extensively refurbished in the early nineteenth century, and has been an hotel since 1996.

Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index pp. 21, 84; N. Pevsner, and B. Cherry, The buildings of England: Wiltshire, 1975, pp. 297-98; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume II, p. 221

Frances Sands, 2011

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 Littlecote, Ramsbury, Wiltshire: unexecuted design for a garden pavilion for General Edward Popham, 1768 (1)