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Purpose
Signed and dated
- 1765
Notes
Lady Betty's brother, Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Erskine (1736-95) (later 7th Earl of Kellie) was a friend of James Boswell, and Boswell recorded having dined with lady Betty in London on Thursday 2 December 1762:
I went to Leicester Street, where Lady Betty had a house taken. I pitied Macfarlane, who is very narrow, and had now house and footmen and coach and dress and entertainment of all kinds to pay. Captain Erskine said that he was past pity, for that he only knew the value of money in trifles; and he also said that to the length of five guineas the Laird might retain some degree of rationality, but when the sum exceeded that, he became perfectly delirious. What an absurd thing was it for this old clumsy dotard to marry a strong young woman of quality. It was certainly vanity, for which he has paid very heavily. Her marrying him was just to support herself and her sisters; and yet to a woman of delicacy, poverty if better than sacrificing her person to a greasy, rotten, nauseous carcass and a narrow vulgar soul.
Lady Betty's husband Walter MacFarlane is known to have died on 5 June 1767 at his Edinburgh townhouse on Canongate. Presumably, it was for that house on Canongate that Adam made his mirror frame design for Lady Betty two years earlier. However, the mirror frame could have been intended for the London townhouse on Leicester Street mentioned by Boswell. It is not known if the mirror frame was ever executed.
Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 56; E. Harris, The furniture of Robert Adam, 1963, Index p. 59; The Journals of James Boswell: 1762-1795, 1991, pp. 20-21
Frances Sands, 2012
Updated by Frances Sands, 2025
With thanks to Charles May for identifying Lady Betty Macfarlane.
Level
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).