A new exhibition has just opened at Compton Verney in Warwickshire: Towering Dreams: Extraordinary Architectural Drawings explores how architects in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries ‘understood the world around them and the ideas and cultures that inspired them’. The majority of the wonderful drawings in the exhibition are on loan from Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, and the subjects include structures we would know today, as well as extraordinary designs that never made it off the drawing board.
Tag: Sir William Chambers
The Casino at Marino, Dublin, Republic of Ireland. And the ones in Yorkshire…
18th century Italy was bustling with rich young noblemen on the Grand Tour. This extended study trip/holiday filled the years between formal education ending and the responsibilities of inheriting an estate, and producing heirs of their own, kicked in. In the early years of the 1750s, a coterie in Rome centred on Charles Caulfeild, Viscount Charlemont, a young Irish dilettante as well read as he was well travelled: Charlemont would travel further than most and see Egypt, Constantinople and Greece. Within his circle for the obligatory sojourn in Italy were two men with strong Yorkshire connections: Thomas Brudenell, Baron Bruce of Tottenham, who had a seat at Tanfield Hall near Ripon, and Henry Willoughby of Birdsall Hall in the East Riding of the county.