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‘Bubo’s’ house

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

T. P . Connor
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Extract

Pope’s poem ‘Of Taste’, his Epistle to Lord Burlington, published in December 1731, has rightly been regarded as one of the major statements of Burlingtonian orthodoxy. Written to accompany the publication of a group of engravings from the earl’s collection of Palladian drawings, many of the poem’s balanced couplets appositely express the ideas of that coterie of classical purists in architecture and also in garden design. The reputation of the poem as a statement of architectural orthodoxy, such that it was bought by the contemporaries anxious to find ou.t what it was that the Palladians intended, was all the more prominent in the absence of any other statement from the Burlington circle, at a time when Kent or Ware were publishing only engravings.

Type
Section 2: London
Information
Architectural History , Volume 27: Design and Practice in British Architecture , 1984 , pp. 111 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1984

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References

Notes

1 Pope, A. An Epistle to The Right Honourable Richard Earl of Burlington. Occasion’d by his Publishing Palladio’s Designs of the Baths, Arches, Theatres, &c. of Ancient Rome, ed. Bateson, F.W. (1961).Google Scholar

2 Correspondance of Alexander Pope, ed. Sherburn, G. (1956) in, 187-88; Pope, Epistle to Burlington, ed. cit., p. xxvi.Google Scholar

3 Walpole, H. Anecdotes of the Artists, iv (1780), 105.Google Scholar

4 The ascription of‘Bubo’ to Dodington, identified by Walpole, was used by Pope in two other poems later in the 1730s, and is now generally accepted, although Pope himself deliberately confused the issue. Pope, Imitations of Horace, etc. ed. Butt, J. (1953), pp. 112, 115, 298, 357-58 Google Scholar; Pope, Epistle to Burlington, ed. cit. AppendixCpp. 182-83.

5 A more dispassionate portrait of Dodington is provided by Cumberland, Richard Memoirs (1806-07), PP- 140-48.Google Scholar

6 Country Life, 11 February 1949, p. 317, letter by F. J. B. Watson. Morris noted on one of the drawings reproduced with this letter ‘I finished the work by a contract for £9,000’.

7 Colvin, H. M. Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600-1840 (1978), p. 727.Google Scholar

8 Survey of London, xx, Trafalgar Square and Neighbourhood (1940), pp. 72-73, pis 55-56. In xxx, St James Westminster (i960) 548, Dodington’s residence in the parish is noted.

9 Pope, A. Epistle to Burlington (1731), lines 19-20.Google Scholar

10 I am grateful to Mr Colvin for the attribution of these drawings to Morris, on the basis of comparison with other signed drawings by the architect. The drawings, one elevation and three plans, are now in the Harbord MSS, in the Norfolk County Record Office, but it is not clear whether they were part of the Harbord papers originally.

11 Westminster Record Office, St James Westminster Parish Rate Books D.36-38 (1727-32). A contemporary newspaper cutting, preserved in the Hammersmith Central Library, and inscribed ‘1731 ’, records that Dodington ‘has purchased the house in Pall-Mall formerly known by the Sign of the Angel, a Bookseller’s Shop, which is to be pull’d down, the better to accommodate the great House that Gentleman is now building in that Street’.

12 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Various Collections VI (1909), p. 11, Thompson to Dodington, 28 November, 1731.

13 Pope, Correspondance, ed. cit., in, 329.?

14 British Library, Prints and Drawings Department, Crace Portfolio (Views) XI, 62. A copy by W. Capon of a sketch by Stroud, Bélanger. D. Henry Holland (1966), p. 68 Google Scholar, suggests that the original should be dated 1787 rather than 1790.

15 Harris, J. Catalogue of the Royal Institute of British Architects Drawings Collection, Campbell (1973), p. 19 Google Scholar, fig. 166.

16 Grub Street Journal, 7 October 1734; for the attribution of these articles to Langley see E. Harris, ‘Batty Langley: A Tutor to Freemasons (1696-1751)’, Burlington Magazine 119 (1977), pp. 327-35.

17 Langley, B. Ancient Masonry (1734-36), p. 333 Google Scholar; Grub Street Journal, 12 December 1734.

18 Hervey, Lord Memoirs, ed. Croker, W. (1848), 1, 434.Google Scholar

19 Stroud, D. op. cit., p. 68 Google Scholar; History of The King’s Works, vi, ed. Crook, J. M. and Port, M. H. (1973), 311, Survey of London, xx (1940), 71-73.Google Scholar