Repositories in North America
A number of North American libraries, art galleries
and private collectors have purchased British topographical and architectural
drawings and paintings. See John Harris, A Catalogue of British Drawings
for architecture, Decoration, Sculpture and Landscape Gardening, 1500-1900, in
American Collections (1971).
In addition some British manuscripts in American collections shed light on building history. Under present law, photocopies or microfilm of all historic manuscripts leaving Britain must be deposited in the British Library. However, manuscripts were exported before that legislation was in place, so the British Library's copy collection is incomplete.
Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, Meyerson Hall, 102, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6311
Collection includes some architectural drawings of:
- Robert Adam
- Gilbert Blount including St. Ambrose Church, Kidderminster, Worcestershire, 1858; St. Edward, Clifford, Yorkshire, c.1844-45; St. Mary, Husband's Bosworth, Leicestershire, 1873-74; St. Mary Magdalene, Brighton, Sussex, 1861-62; St. Peter, Gloucester, 1859-60, 1867-88; Our Lady and St. Catherine of Siena Church, London, 1869-70
- William Chambers
- James Thomas Knowles
- William Butterfield.
Canadian Centre for Architecture 1920 Baile Street, Montreal, Quebec
- Collection: Over 100,000 prints and drawings, including British 18th and
19th-century architectural drawings:
- Nicholas Hawksmoor, designs for All Souls College, Oxford (1721), and an album of drawings for proposed alterations to Ockham Park, Surrey (1729-1730).
- James Gibbs, portfolio of plans, elevations and sections for the Radcliffe Library, Oxford (1737).
- William Chambers, design for a bridge in the Chinese style to be erected at Sanssouci Palace, Potsdam, Germany (ca. 1763).
- James Paine, elevation and section for a country villa, mid 1740s-mid 1770s.
- Robert Mylne, drawings for City of London's Lying-In Hospital
(1770-1773), The Wick, Richmond Hill (1775), and several villas.
- Designs for Fawley Court by John Francis Moore (1767) and James Wyatt (1771)
- John Carter, an album of drawings (Architectural Ornaments 1778) and water-colour of the north front of Lea Castle.
- John Soane, designs for Hinton House, Somerset, 1785-1786, Combe House, Devonshire 1811, 8 drawings for cottages.
- Designs for Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire, 1793-4, and Bagshot Park, Surrey 1798, with alterations by Sir John Soane.
- Humphrey Repton, view and Red Book for Burton Park 1798.
- John Pentland, drawings for a circular gothic folly (1790).
- George Dance the elder and younger, various drawings 18th-century to 1800.
- William Inwood and his second son Charles Frederick Inwood, designs for Westminster Hospital, London (1832-1834); Charles Frederick Inwood, designs for Marlow Church (18th-century); Drawings by William Inwood and his elder son Henry William Inwood and their draughtsman Lake Price for St. Pancras New Church (ca. 1840).
- John Nash, preliminary designs for Regent's Park 1811-1812. Charles Frederick Inwood, designs for Marlow Church (18th-century);
- George Edmund Street, Sketchbook of travels through Kent, Sussex and London (1844-1845).
- Designs by William Butterfield for the Church of St. Matthias in Stoke Newington, London
- Other 19th-century British architectural drawings includes works by Charles Barry, Gertrude Jekyll and Edwin Landseer Lutyens, Augustus Charles and Augustus Welby Pugin, Alfred Waterhouse, and the Wyatt family.
- the archive of Cedric Price (1934-2003).
- Catalogue: Collections Online allows the user to search the prints, drawings and photographs collections and one third of the archives collection.
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Has a collection of British topographical prints. Online, searchable catalogue of images.
Folger Shakespeare
Library, 201 East Capitol St., S.E., Washington, D.C. 20003-1094
- Access: Restricted to those with a Ph.D., graduate students writing a Ph.D. thesis or other persons with a particular need to use the collections.
- Collection: focuses on Shakespeare and his time and includes MSS, maps, paintings, drawings and prints. MSS include the Losely papers of the More family (16th-17th century); papers of the Bacon-Townshend families (16th-17th century); the Cavendish-Talbot families (1548-1607); the Rich family (1485-1820); the Bagot family (1557-1671); the Robert Bennett papers (17th-century).
- Catalogues:
- Online catalogue Hamnet mainly contains published works, but does include the papers of the Bacon-Townshend, Bagot, Bennet, Cavendish-Talbot, Loseley, North, and Rich families, and the Trevelyon Miscellany.
- Online image database includes unique images of London in 1598 (ms V.a. 318), and Georgian plans and water-colour of the theatre built by Henry Giffard in Alie Street, Goodman's Fields, London, and water-colour of the Old Theatre on Tankard Street, Ipswich (ART Vol. d94).
- The Catalog of Manuscripts of The Folger Shakespeare Library, 3 vols. (New York 1971).
- The Catalogue of Paintings in the Folger Shakespeare Library (Yale, 1993).
- The Catalog of Prints, Engravings, Photographs, and Original Art Materials of The Folger Shakespeare Library, 4 vols. (New York 1984).
Harvard Law School Library, 1563 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
Collection: over 1,000 English deeds dating from circa 1170 to 1888, including those of the Hale family of King's Walden (Hertfordshire).
Huntington Library and Art Collections, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, California 91108
- Collection: One of the largest collections of British drawings and MSS in
the USA, formed by Henry E. Huntington. The drawings and watercolours focus
on 18th and 19th-century British topography. The MSS include:
- Battle Abbey Papers: monastic accounts and records: see Descriptive Catalogue of the... Muniments of Battle Abbey etc. on sale by Thomas Thorpe (1835). An 18th-century transcript of the cartulary from this collection is in the British Library (Add MS 6344 and 6348.)
- Hastings Papers: a large number of deeds, court rolls and accounts for Leicestershire and elsewhere, and a large collection of correspondence: calendared in Report on the Manuscripts of the late Reginald Rawdon Hastings, HMC 78, 4 vols (1928-47) and Henry E. Huntington Library Hastings Manuscripts, List and Index Society Special Series Vol.22 (1987).
- Stowe Collection: early Grenville deeds, mostly for Buckinghamshire, and Temple and Grenville estate records.
- Ellesmere Collection: deeds, court rolls, and accounts, largely for Cheshire and the Northwest, the letters and papers of Egerton and the Earls of Bridgwater: briefly calendared in Eleventh Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (1887). Copies of a calendar made c.1900 are held by Cambridge University Library and the National Library of Scotland.
- The Brydges Papers include 70 letterbooks of James, 1st Duke of Chandos (early Georgian developer in Bath, London, etc.) Microfilm of some of this material is in Bath Reference Library.
- The Loudoun Collection: includes Scottish estate papers.
- Guides and catalogues:
- Guide to British Historical Manuscripts in the Huntington Library (1982).
- C.W. Dutschke et al., Guide to the Medieval and Renaissance Documents in the Huntingdon Library (1989).
- The Huntington Art Collections: A Handbook (1986).
- Robert R. Wark, Early British Drawings in the Huntington Collection, 1600-1750.
- Robert R. Wark, British Landscape Drawings and Watercolors, 1750-1850. (24 examples from the Huntington collection.)
- Robert R. Wark, British Landscape Watercolors from Southern California Private Collections.
- Robert R. Wark, Drawings by Thomas Rowlandson in the Huntington Collection.
- Online catalogue: rather limited for those searching for manuscripts.
Library of Congress: Prints and Photographs
This huge collection of images naturally focuses on the United States, but does include a few architectural and topographical drawings for England and Scotland, and old photographs of places in the United Kingdom and Ireland, which can be found via the online catalogue.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Museum
William Robert Ware studied European architectural education and practice
before creating the first architectural curriculum in America in 1868. His
collection of English
architectural drawings includes works by Alfred Waterhouse, Enoch Bassett
Keeling, Thomas Little, and Robert Jewell Withers.
Tufts University, Massachusetts
Edwin C. Bolles collection of publications, maps and images on the history and topography of London, which can be searched online.
University of Chicago Library
- Collection: The papers of Sir Nicholas Bacon include:
- manorial records and deeds medieval to 18th century, mainly for an estate in Essex and Suffolk, but with some material relating to places in Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire.
- letters and papers of Sir Nicholas as Lord Keeper of the Great Seal December 1558-February 1579, including papers 1561-7 relating to the repair of St Paul's Cathedral, London, after a fire.
- Calendar: University of Chicago Library, Department of Special Collections. Calendar of the Martin A. Ryerson Collection of Court and Manorial Documents from the Estate of Sir Nicholas Bacon in the University of Chicago Library. Chicago: (University of Chicago Library, 1974). Also published as Papers of Sir Nicholas Bacon in the University of Chicago Library, List and Index Society Special Series 25 (1989).
Yale Center for British Art,
1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut
- Collection: The most comprehensive collection of English paintings, prints and drawings outside Great Britain, donated to Yale University by Paul Mellon, an avid Anglophile. It includes thousands of topographical drawings and paintings.
- Catalogues:
- John Baskett and Dudley Snelgrove, The Drawings of Thomas Rowlandson in the Paul Mellon Collection: catalogue (1977).
- Basil Taylor, Painting in England 1700-1850: Collection of Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon (1963).
- Christopher White, English Landscape, 1630-1850: drawings, prints and books from the Paul Mellon collection (1977).
- Scott Wilcox, British Watercolors: Drawings of the 18th and 19th centuries from the Yale Center for British Art (1985).
- Catalogues of its collections are held by its sister institution Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art 16 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3JA.
Yale: Lewis Walpole Library, 154 Main Street, Farmington, Connecticut
- Collection bequeathed to Yale University by Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis, who collected the letters and works of Horace Walpole (1717- 1797), a leading advocate of neo-Gothic.
- Transcript: W.S. Lewis (ed), The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence, 48 vols. (1937-83).
- Horace Walpole's Stawberry Hill Collection includes prints, drawings, and watercolors related to Horace Walpole's collection and house at Strawberry Hill.