Soane and the Grenvilles: Peter Inskip traces the story of Sir John Soane's work at Stowe, Buckingham House, Brasenose College, and Wotton House

Apollo, April, 2004 by Peter Inskip

The employment of architects by the Temple and Grenville families of Stowe is characterised by three different periods of patronage. In the first hall of the eighteenth century, under Sir Richard Temple, Viscount Cobham (1675-1749), Stowe became an architectural treasury of the work of the best architects available: Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726), James Gibbs (1682-1754), William Kent (1685-1748) and Lancelot Brown (1716-1783). The second, related to the time of Lord Cobham's nephew, Richard Grenville, 2nd Earl Temple (1711-1779), was a period of amateur enthusiasm, supported by professional architects who included exotic figures from Italy and France: Giambattista Borra (1713-70), George Francois Blondel (c. 1730-after 1791) and Vincenzo Valdre (c. 1742-1814). The third, extending over the ownership of George Grenville, 1st Marquess of Buckingham (1753-1813), and his son, Richard Grenville, 1st Duke of Buckingham (1776-1839), was dominated by Sir John Soane (1753-1837) and for more than forty years the family loyally turned to him for advice. Although his Gothic Library is often seen as a somewhat isolated commission, with Stowe House largely finished under Earl Temple, Soane's extensive work for the next two generations of the Grenvilles has to be seen in the context of their estates. (1)

To understand the period of Soane's influence, it is necessary to appreciate the role that Lord Temple's cousin, Thomas Pitt, later 1st Baron Camelford (1737-93), had played during the preceding period. From the mid 1760s Earl Temple had been supported in all his architectural forays by him, and it was Pitt who was eventually responsible for the remodelling the exterior of Stowe House in the 1770s.

On his return to England from Spain in 1762, Pitt became a member of the 'committee of taste' that Horace Walpole (1717-97) had assembled for the remodeling of Strawberry Hill, Middlesex and it was, therefore, natural for him to act in a similar capacity for his cousin. His best work at Stowe is the Corinthian Arch of 1765. (2) The scale of the triumphal arch is gargantuan and this is reinforced by its highly simplified architectural detail. Although keen to design, Pitt was a poor draughtsman and it is significant that Edward Batchelor, the carver from Buckingham, should be charging in November 1765 for 'taking of the Arch 2 1/2 days and Planning the same, and drawing in the House for Mr Pitt to see 1.19.1 [pounds sterling]'. (3) The remodelling of the north font followed Pitt's alterations to several of the garden temples, and brought to the mansion the monumentality that he had introduced to Stowe with the Corinthian Arch. As with the arch, Pitt was supported by a professional, this time a London surveyor named William Ride (c. 1723-78), whose name regularly appears in the Stowe accounts from 1756 until his death in 1778. (4)

The greatest conundrum facing Lord Temple had been how to recast the visually disparate elements of the south front of Stowe House which had resulted from its piecemeal extension over several decades under Lord Cobham. During a period of twenty years, proposals by Borra and Blondel had come to nothing, but the matter was at last resolved in 1770 by Robert Adam (1728-92). He proposed unifying the south front by means of a giant order and treating the elevation of the three-storey house as one palatial floor set on a high basement. By incorporating the triumphal arch motif of Pitt's Corinthian Arch, a mile away across the South Vista, he would have united both house and landscape. Although only an elevation survives in the Soane Museum, the modelling shown by the sciagraphic rendering and discussion about 'Adam's dome' in the family's correspondence (6) leads one to suggest that Robert Adam may also have been responsible for the concept of the Oval Hall that was to be built behind the portico. Indeed, the importance of the plan in Adam's projects means that the elevation would not have been designed in isolation. The windowless, top-lit hall at Stowe has, therefore, a parallel in Adam's proposal for a central rotunda at Syon (c. 1768) and can be related to the blind entrance elevation of the early designs for Luton Hoo (1772). (7) Unfortunately, Adam could not tolerate the Earl's constant meddling with his design. He withdrew his services and the South Front was executed under Thomas Pitt. Pitt modified Adam's scheme, raising the heights of the pavilions, altering the order, and introducing steps up to the portico. On seeing it completed in 1774, Lord Temple's sister, Hester, Baroness Chatham, wrote admiringly of 'the elegant skill of Mr Pitt's architectural genius'. (8) It might be questioned, however, if Pitt's heightening of the roof-line of the pavilions--to match that of the main, central block--was an improvement on the subtly hierarchical scheme proposed by Adam.

It must have been Thomas Pitt who introduced Soane to the Marquess of Buckingham. Pitt had befriended and patronised Soane in Italy in 1778, and the young architect had written to him for advice on his design for a Castello d'Acqua. (9) Soane saw Pitt as his mentor and paid tribute to his memory in his Royal Academy lectures, ranking him with Lords Burlington and Pembroke as leaders of English architectural taste. (10) In the 1780s Pitt employed Soane to undertake repairs to: Boconnoc, his country seat in Cornwall, Petersham Lodge, his Surrey villa, and who sought advice about his own house in Kent. (11) Despite the architect's reputed denial, the commission from the Prime Minister must have helped to secure, two years later, what was to be the most important commission of his career--the rebuilding of the Bank of England.