Sir William Chambers, Knight of the Polar Star

A. Zwemmer, London, first edition, 1970. Cloth, large 8vo, 30 cm,. xvi, 397 pp, 199 half-tone plates, 16 text ills. The first detailed study of Sir William Chambers, "an architect who dominated the professional and official architectural scene in his day. ...Chambers stands distinct from any other British architect in the eighteenth century. He was an Anglo-Swede, and was educated and trained in an international milieu. The range and depth of his thinking and scholarship were attributable to these circumstances. They are epitomized in the great Treatise on Civil Architecture of 1759, wherein is condensed and clarified all that had been written on architectural and philosophical thought. As an eclectic he chose the middle-of-the-road, and only occasionally did he willingly accept new ideas in architecture; yet in many ways his reasonableness makes his buildings more endearing. His love for Paris and French architecture is inherent in his first and last designs: for Frederick Prince of Wales's Mausoleum (1751), a revolutionary statement from the French Academy in Rome, and for Somerset House (1776), a monument to the tastes of Antoine, Gabriel and de Wailly, as well as being the perfect text-book of Georgian craftsmanship. Chambers was a man of parts: a Swedish Knight, an intimate of George Ill, the founder of the Royal Academy, a garden designer, a 'pritty connoisseur' in furniture, the virtual father of his profession in the modern sense; a wit and a man with a deep feeling for the humanity and well-being of his servants in the Office of Works." - from the blurb. Very Good in Very Good price-clipped dustwrapper.