Exhibitions 2
Sir William Chambers: Architect to George III (Courtauld Gallery, till 5 January) Robert Adam: The Creative Mind (Sir John Soane's Museum, till 1 March)
Georgian rivals
Ruth Guilding
cp ublic buildings are the most splendid monuments of a great and opulent people,' wrote Robert Adam in 1764. It was Adam's extreme misfortune to be born five years after another architect who was his natural rival, whose luck in winning placement and patronage plus a strong business sense gained him the very royal and public com- missions which Adam craved. As students in Rome and as qualified practitioners, their careers ran in tandem, but Adam's imperfect successes were eclipsed by Chambers's triumphs again and again.
Born in Gothenburg of merchant stock, William Chambers entered the Swedish East India Company at 17, and made a serious study of Chinese architecture and gardens during stays in the port of Canton. Later, this expertise was to prove invalu- able in an age which craved aesthetic, hor- ticultural and scientific novelty. It brought him to the attention of the scholar Lin- naeus, gave him the material for three pub- lications and furnished him with Chinoiserie prototypes which were instru- mental in his first royal appointment. (He was made Architect to the Dowager Princess Augusta in 1757, laying out `poor Fred's' landscape gardens at Kew, and teaching her son Prince George.) Chambers left the Company in 1749, and spent five more years studying architecture under Blondel at the Ecole des Arts in Paris and with Clerisseau in Rome; by now he was sufficiently well-off to marry. All this was achieved while the young Robert Adam was still labouring for his father's architectural practice in Scotland, rebuild- ing decayed military fortifications at Fort George in Inverness.
Making his own tour in Italy in 1755, Adam self-consciously postured as a gen- tleman dilettante: 'My being an artist, if I am discovered to be such may do me hurt.' But secretly he studied hard in Rome, tak- ing drawing lessons from Dewez, Lalle- mand, Pecheux, Clerisseau and Piranesi. Within a few months of Adam's arrival in Rome, Chambers had set off to begin his career in England, leaving the younger man penning a long, fretful analysis of his rival: `His sense is middling, but his appearance is gentell and his person good which are most material circumstances . . . it will require very considerable interest to suc- ceed against Chambers who has tolerable Friends and real merit.'
On leaving for London himself some two years later, Adam had established a quasi- commercial 'friendship' with Piranesi, assembled a huge drawing collection, and taken Clerisseau into his service; together they made a detour to Dalmatia where he set Clerisseau to measuring the ruins of the Emperor Diocletian's Palace at Spalatro, the intended subject of his first architec- tural publication.
The bathos of this one-sided rivalry was not lost on the curators who staged these two exhibitions to run concurrently. At Somerset House, resplendent in the Great Room and adjacent chambers which he designed for the Royal Academy there, Chambers's large confident productions are magnificently displayed: the gleaming silverware for the Duke of Marlborough, the designs for Kew Gardens and George III's youthful sketches made under Cham- bers's tutelage, the model for the gilded Coronation Coach smothered with tritons and putti, and Lord Charlemont's exquisite medal cabinet, all laid out under the impas- sive gaze of Chambers's royal patrons and fellow Academicians whose portraits hang above. Across the courtyard, Chambers's government offices designed for the Navy, including the Seamen's Hall and Navy Staircase, are open for visitors to the exhi- bition by special arrangement on Satur- days.
In Sir John Soane's house in Lincoln's Inn Fields, the dining parlour is now a modest gallery displaying a fraction of the huge holding of drawings which Soane bought from Adam's heirs in 1833, a decade after the British Museum had rejected them. This exhibition provides a selective focus upon certain disciplines peculiar to Robert Adam, his proficiency in the quick-fire sketch, his sensibility for the picturesque, and his management of a drawing office where drudges and virtuosi laboured to develop these sketches into highly coloured presentation drawings for the client.
One fine example is his 'Panoramic Per- spective of Offices at Brampton Bryan, Herefordshire', 1777, for the Earl of Oxford, a ruined court of monumental offices and stables to serve Bryan Hall and its old castle. Its fortified Roman architec- ture refers to the record of Spalatro confi- dently made on the return journey from Italy 20 years earlier, but, like so much of the fruits of Robert Adam's fertile imagi- nation, this design never progressed beyond the work on paper. It fell to Sir William Chambers to build Somerset House, that 'splendid monument of a great and opulent people' which Adam had hopefully anticipated; while Adam retired to Scotland, castle building and designing for the universities at Edinburgh and Glasgow. But by a strange twist of fate, the vain and overweening Scotsman had left his name writ the larger for posterity: the terms `Adamesque' and 'Age of Adam' are now synonymous with the best of Geor- gian architecture.
`Lecture diagram of all buildings in Kew Gardens, on show at the Courtauld Gallery
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