THOMAS, William.

Fine copy of the first and only edition of this most attractive collection of original designs by William Thomas, with plans, elevations, ceilings, sections and various architectural ornaments for country villas and own houses. Two ceiling designs are handsomely hand-coloured, and the subscribers’ list includes major architects such as Robert Adam, who inspired Thomas’ work, George Dance, to whom Soane was apprenticed, Henry Holland, James Stuart and James Wyatt, among others. William Thomas (d.1800), from Pembroke, was ‘one of the very few Welsh architects to publish works on architectural designs’ (Hilling, p.9). In 1785, he presented this volume to the Society of Arts (Fitton, p.196). The ‘most approved taste’ mentioned on the titlepage was the Neo-Classical style. As the Introduction acknowledges, ‘the night of Gothic Ignorance [having] being happily dispelled by the bright sun of Science’, it left room to the development of classical architecture in the Renaissance. Thomas based his designs on ‘Convenience, Beauty and Stability’, the ‘Extent, Soil, Form and Situation’ of each location, and ‘the Foundation, Solidity, and relative Dimensions’ (i.e., the rules of proportion). In the explanations of the designs, Thomas illuminates the reasons behind them, e.g., preventing ‘disagreeable effects’, the creation of stairs to ‘conceal the Servants Offices’, making a building look larger, a ‘display of grandeur’, etc. The design for a villa on pl.3 accommodates also ‘warming machines’ to be ‘fixed in the niches in the Hall and Saloon’, i.e., Buzaglo stoves, or cast-iron coal-burning stoves very common in affluent London houses in the late C18. Typical Neo-Classical decorations include grotesques and Picturesque ornaments, such as grottos with shell-work and water fountains, with pl.27 being devoted to Neo-Classical furniture design, including a pier glass and a girandole for the drawing rooms of William Dymock and John Harris. Some designs reflect actual buildings, such as a Gothic temple for the Earl of Shelburne, the garden front at John Campbell’s Stackpole Court, a plan of Surrey Chapel in St George’s Road, Southwark, another for Mr Mirehouse’s house in Pembrokeshire, and a Surrey hunting seat. A very handsome copy of this lavishly illustrated architectural book.