William Bruce’s Hopetoun House and the arrival of Serlio’s unpublished ‘Sixth Book on Dwellings’ in Britain, c 1700

Abstract

William Bruce’s Hopetoun House, begun in 1699, would have been Britain’s first centrally planned villa, had it been completed as specified in the original contract. The source of its plan has attracted much speculation but this article argues that the closest precedent is a plan in the first draft of Sebastiano Serlio’s unpublished ‘Sixth Book on Dwellings’, dating from the 1540s and preserved in an album, now belonging to the Avery Library in New York. The author demonstrated in an article published in 2022 that the album was in the ownership of the London sculptor, Francis Bird, by the early 18th century. The article here suggests that the original plan of Hopetoun House shows that the Avery Album was known to William Bruce by the late 1690s, and to James Smith; and that it was the source of the plan of Lord Burlington’s Chiswick House; and may have inspired projects by Nicholas Hawksmoor and James Gibbs.