As a consequence, the bulk of his buildings were in London and the Home Counties, and sadly they have suffered heavily from demolition, redevelopment, wartime bombing and subsequent alteration over the course of the last 250 years. During the 1750s, Taylor embraced the prevailing fashion for the Rococo, and produced some of the finest chimneypieces in that style. Only a handful are known to have survived the depredations of the intervening years, and this is the supreme example of them all - executed in fine-grained limestone, and displaying perfectly Taylor’s mastery of sculpture and design. Sir Robert Taylor, 1714 - 1788 Taylor’s Stone Buildings, Lincoln’s Inn, showing wartime damage. Introduction The researching of this chimneypiece entailed delving into the archives of the Taylorian Institute in Oxford, endowed by Taylor himself, hunting for clues in the vast repository of the British Library, following a trail that ultimately led to the firm identification of its designer. It has been possible to determine beyond doubt that the chimneypiece was indeed designed by Sir Robert Taylor, and there is a powerful case to be made that it was originally located in the dining room of 36, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, prior to its demolition in 1859. This exceptional chimneypiece is of great historical importance for a combination of reasons. Firstly, being by Sir Robert Taylor it is both architecturally significant, and, being Rococo, extremely rare. Taylor was described by Colvin in his Biographical Dictionary of English Architects as “ the most successful architect of his time”. As The King’s Architect, as well as Surveyor and Architect to the Bank of England; H.M Customs; The Admiralty; Greenwich Hospital; Lincoln’s Inn and many others, he was described by Sir William Chambers’ biographer as having with Paine “nearly divided the architectural profession between them until Robert Adam entered the list”. The apotheosis of three dimensional Rococo design - the Lord Mayor’s State Coach - was by Taylor, along with the Old Bank of England, the pediment of Mansion House and an extensive corpus of work including country
In the Taylorian Institute in Oxford, there survive twelve drawings of Rococo chimneypieces and overmantels. These constitute a small fragment of Taylor’s prolific architectural output, and together with a volume of sketches and designs for monuments, and another dealing with various geometric and perspective problems, are almost all that remains of what was known on his death to have been a comprehensive corpus of his work. What happened to the remainder is a mystery. A tiny handful of other drawings have been found, including, importantly, one of the dining room at Trewithen House in Cornwall, as well as of the stone bridge at Maidenhead. Combined with these, are the surviving examples from the brief period when Rococo was in fashion and which formed the focal point of his interiors in the 1750s and early 1760s. Drawing room, Asgill (above) Dining room, Asgill (right) These would include Asgill House in Richmond, Barlaston Hall in Staffordshire, Trewithen as previously mentioned, together with two examples that came to the market in the last twenty-five years - an attractive but modest marble one and another large stone version of the Asgill dining room mantel (see below). Fortuitously, there are some black and white photographs of the interior of 35, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, taken in 1912 as part of a survey of the district carried out by London County Council. Those reveal that there were three pure English Rococo chimneypieces present, one in the front room of the ground floor, one in the middle room on the first floor, and a large stone one, incongruously, in the basement kitchen. From the positioning of the example at Asgill, and as planned in the drawing for Trewithen, it is clear this style of chimneypiece would have been in the dining room initially.