Sir William
Saturday, September 12th, 2009An outstanding “official architect” whose reputation as “a prodigy for genius, for sense and good taste” was earned early. His architecture blends concerns with Palladianism - symmetrical, well-ordered facades - with, in the interiors, early forms of Neo-Classicism, learned in Italy.
The son of a Scottish merchant who had established himself in Gothenburg, Chambers was educated in England and returned to Sweden at the age of sixteen to enter the service of the Swedish East India Company. This is the first clue to his unusual career, for travelling out to Bengal and China gave him an almost unrivalled knowledge of Oriental art.
By 1749 he had saved enough money from these spirited labours to make architecture his “sole study and profession”. Travelling to study in Paris he journeyed on to Italy and was there by the autumn of 1750. There he not only studied under drawing masters, including the influential Charles-Louis (1721-80), but absorbed ideas current at the French Academy in Rome. These were concerned with observing antiquity and developing ways of giving it new and influential forms in contemporary decoration.
In 1755 Chambers returned to England with a wife and an infant daughter. As with his rival Robert Adam, commissions were at first few, but Chambers’ ferocious talent came early to the notice of Lord Bute, who recommended him as architectural tutor to the Prince of Wales, the future George III. This was an auspicious start to his long patronage by the royal family.
Augusta, the Dowager Princess of Wales, mindful of the drawings Chambers had made in Rome for a mausoleum to her husband Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales (d. 1751), asked him in 1757 to lay out the gardens of her Surrey house at Kew. Many bridges, temples and the celebrated Pagoda (1761-2) were built and in 1763 were further set out, fulsomely, in a hook by Chambers.
With Lord Bute’s patronage, as with Adam, Chambers had been appointed in 1761 as one of the Joint Architects of the King’s Works. By 1769 he was so indispensable an official architect that he was appointed Comptroller of the King’s Works. When the office was reorganized in 1782 he became both Surveyor-General and Comptroller.
Chambers’ architecture divides into three unequal representations. Firstly the public buildings, and pre-eminently Somerset House in the Strand, London, which dominated his last twenty years (1776-96); secondly a number of town houses in London, Edinburgh and Dublin; finally the country houses: at least forty-five commissions, from 1757 onwards. All were controlled by an able and sympathetic architect.