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In the introduction to his Book of Architecture Gibbs avers that his primary intention is to provide the provincial gentry with models from which local craftsmen, otherwise uninstructed in designing with taste, could work. The craftsmen themselves were not expected to buy the book and few of them did. One exception was William Adam, who came to own an important architectural library. Francis Smith, by contrast, probably had few books. His name does not appear in the subscription lists of any of the pattern books of his time; and he doubtless subscribed rather to the belief that any client who wanted to go beyond his architect’s normal architectural range could be expected to provide the visual material from his own library. Smith almost certainly had a copy of Fréarťs Parallel of the Ancient Architecture and the Modern, from which almost all his orders are derived; late in life he apparently replaced it with Gibbs’s Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of Architecture. For more exotic detail he was able to call on Domenico de Rossi’s Studio d’Architettura Civile often enough for it to be likely that he had copies at least of a number of plates from the first volume.
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- Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1992
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Notes
1 The contents of Adam’s library have been given a preliminary analysis by Rowan, Alistair in Architectural Heritage, 1 (1990), pp. 8–33 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Journal, p. 257 (now kept in Northants County Record Office), The journal has ben examined by Madge, H. J. M. in an unpublished dissertation for the History of Art Tripos at Cambridge, 1981 Google Scholar: see p. 6.
3 See Whiffen, Marcus, Thomas Archer, Architect of the English Baroque (2nd edn, Los Angeles, 1973), pp. 22, 95Google Scholar; the Heythrop sources in Rossi are fully explored by Madge, op. cit., pp. 22-26.
4 Whiffen, pp. 22 f. Madge, pp. 9ff.
5 Madge, p. 17; Colvin, H., Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, p. 750 Google Scholar.
6 See Country Life, 13 February 1975, pp. 380 f. Rather less convincingly Binney traces the ground-floor windows on either side of the main entrance to G. B. Soria’s Dominican chuch of Sta Caterina da Siena (Rossi III.8). But Volume III was only issued (in Rome) in 1721; and these windows could well have been adapted from similarly placed windows on the entrance front of Heythrop.
7 Gervase Jackson-Stops’ attempt to bolster Archer’s claims by arguing that some drawings from the ‘Cliveden Album’ are (a) draft plans for Chicheley and (b) in Archer’s hand (see Architectural History 20 (1977), pp. 72 f. and pls 60-63) is to my mind questionable on both counts: the plans, though having a superficial similarity to Chicheley’s, are not easy to square with it; and the forms of numerals which Jackson-Stops invokes as characteristic of Archer are in fact equally so of Smith. The drawings may be his.
8 Country Life, 19 February 1970, p. 436.
9 The house has long been called Donegall House, but its connection with the Earl of Donegal remains a mystery. It is now part of the Guildhall.
10 The Bernini window was transcribed more literally, though without a moulded frame to the window opening and with the addition of small volutes at the bottom in both dimensions, for the north front of Beningborough — where, in consequence, Archer has once again been brought in to explain the use of Rossi. Jackson-Stops, (National Trust Guide (1980), p. 38 Google Scholar) suggests that Archer ‘as an amateur gentleman-architect, merely gave advice to John Bourchier on various points of detail’. Perhaps, for the coupled consoles in the frieze at Beningborough seem to derive from that at Heythrop; but equally William Thornton, who is now established as Bourchier’s architect, could have seen Heythrop for himself, and it was presumably he who as expert joiner as well as architect liberally added many more similar brackets in the drawing and smoking rooms. The brackets — also used enthusiastically in the dining room at Davenport and great parlour at Badminton — may derive ultimately from a doorcase on the Palazzo Doria-Pamphilj in Genoa (which is fairly closely reproduced at Davenport); Jackson-Stops suggests that the intermediate source may be Marot’s Nouveau Livre d’Ornements. But rather than supposing Archer looking round the half-built house and proposing a window here and a doorcase there, it seems more natural to think of Thornton working directly from Rossi and perhaps other pattern books. Thus the doorcase at the foot of the stairs, though not a direct transcription, seems to be a conflation of two or three designs in Rossi (e.g. 1.138 and 129).
11 Bucks County Record Office, D/C/2/35(ii).
12 Known from an engraving by Rocque (‘The Original Design of ye Rt Honbl ye Ld Harcourt’s House … as it was drawn by Mr. Archer …’: British Museum, King’s Maps xxvii, 6).
13 See below. The staircase is illustrated in Lees-Milne, English Country Houses: Baroque (1970), pl. 75. Pilasters with similar, though quieter, capitals reappear c. 1727 in a staircase painting of more bourgeois character once in 44 Grosvenor Square, London and now in the Victoria & Albert Museum (see Survey of London, vol. XL, p. 155 and pl. 44d; also Desmond Fitz-Gerald, in Victoria & Albert Museum Yearbook, no. 1 (1969), pp. 145-51). This painting has been attributed to Laguerre’s son John, who is known to have painted another at 48 Grosvenor Street, now destroyed, where the ‘Composed Order’ referred to in an inventory of 1750 might perhaps have had the same in-turned whorls. (See Survey, vol. XL, p. 47.) Well over halfa century earlier, however, John Webb had included, within seven sheets of capitals derived from Giovanni Battista Montano’s Cinque Libri d’Architettura, a number with in-turned whorls, some of which may be described as fancifully Corinthian though most are fantastic to the point of being Dietterlinesque (see Catalogue of the R.I.B.A. Drawings Collection: Jones & Webb (Farnborough 1972), p. 27 and figs 209-15). The drawings remained of course wholly theoretical.
14 Though Smith is not known to have used these capitals externally, his former pupil Nathaniel Ireson did, at Crowcombe Court, Somerset, in the early 1730s, and may have influenced the Bastard brothers who made a feature of them on several prominent houses in their rebuilding of Blandford Forum after the fire of 1731. Ireson too was involved in the rebuilding. Since he had left Smith before 1720 he probably didn’t get the idea from his master, and it is just possible that it came independently of Rossi from the remarkable early sixteenth-century Easter Sepulchre in the church at Tarrant Hinton, five miles north-east of Blandfod, which has exuberant Renaissance detail including baluster-shaped columns with capitals of an incipient Corinthian form with in-turned whorls reversing the curves of stiff’brackets’. (See Buildings of England: Dorset, p. 417 and pl. 43, and Morshead, Dorset Churches (1975), p. 49.)
15 Illustrated in T. Friedman, James Gibbs(1984), pp. 135-37, and C. Amery, Period Houses and their Details (1974), pl. 108, 110-12. Gibbs’s drawing is in the Ashmolean collection (III. 97).
16 See Tipping, H. Avray, English Homes, Period V, p. 215 Google Scholar, fig. 258.
17 The saloon at Davenport has the outer form reduced to a diagram — plain straight-sided pentagons devoid of carving so that there should be no concealing of the fine cross-banding which is the special feature of the room.
18 Madge (op. cit. note 2, p. 24) points to the diagonal consoles supporting the cornice in the Roman design as the source of those on the outswinging overdoor of the main entrance at Heythrop.