Treasury House, 10 Downing Street, London: Plan of the Great Middle Room (Sir Robert Walpole's Levee Room, Northwest Corner, First Floor)

Treasury House, 10 Downing Street, London: Plan of the Great Middle Room (Sir Robert Walpole's Levee Room, Northwest Corner, First Floor)

Isaac Ware

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This is one of eight drawings in the album that relate to Treasury House. In 1732 George II offered Sir Robert Walpole, the First Lord of the Treasury two adjacent properties to serve as a London residence. These included a sixteenth-century mansion facing St. James's Park and townhouse behind it fronting onto Downing Street, the latter designed by Sir Christopher Wren in the seventeenth-century. The location next to Whitehall Palace and within walking distance of Parliament suited the busy first minister and Walpole accepted the gift on the condition that the residence pass to subsequent holders of his office, rather than to his heirs. After an adjacent cottage was vacated and torn down, William Kent gutted the interiors and united the structures, creating a new complex of sixty rooms. Walpole and his wife took up residence in 1735 and remained until 1742 (additional work, such as the construction of a terrace facing the park continued after 1735). When Walpole left office in 1742, he vacated the house and his picture collection was sent to Houghton. "Number 10" today remains the the official residence of Britain's Prime Minister and has undergone several subsequent rebuiding campaigns. Walpole, who worked closely with his Whig allies in Parliament, and with George I and II, to secure the Hanoverian succession, is now considered the nation's first Prime Minister in the modern sense (although he was not called that, since the term only came into common use in the nineteenth century). Kent's reputation as an architect and designer of interiors had been established at Chiswick House, which he completed in 1729 for Lord Burlington, then in the interiors designed at Houghton Hall (ca. 1725-35) for Sir Robert Walpole. These undoubtedly led to the commission to create the new Treasury House. Isaac Ware had worked as chief-of-works at Houghton and inscriptions by Horace Walpole on several of these drawings identify him as draftsman.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Treasury House, 10 Downing Street, London: Plan of the Great Middle Room (Sir Robert Walpole's Levee Room, Northwest Corner, First Floor)Treasury House, 10 Downing Street, London: Plan of the Great Middle Room (Sir Robert Walpole's Levee Room, Northwest Corner, First Floor)Treasury House, 10 Downing Street, London: Plan of the Great Middle Room (Sir Robert Walpole's Levee Room, Northwest Corner, First Floor)Treasury House, 10 Downing Street, London: Plan of the Great Middle Room (Sir Robert Walpole's Levee Room, Northwest Corner, First Floor)Treasury House, 10 Downing Street, London: Plan of the Great Middle Room (Sir Robert Walpole's Levee Room, Northwest Corner, First Floor)

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.