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Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Campbell, Colin (d.1729)

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Colen Campbell in the ODNB.

1323583Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 08 — Campbell, Colin (d.1729)1886Gordon Goodwin

CAMPBELL, COLIN (d. 1729), architect, was a native of Scotland. Of his birthplace, parentage, or education, we can recover no particulars. The best of his works was Wanstead House, Essex, built about 1715–20, and pulled down in 1822. Its sumptuousness greatly impressed contemporary critics, by whom it was pronounced ‘one of the noblest houses, not only in England, but in Europe.’ It was of Portland stone, with a front extending 260 feet in length, in depth 70 feet, and had in the centre a Corinthian portico of six columns, 3 feet in diameter. The wings which Campbell designed were not added. Campbell also built the Rolls House in Chancery Lane, 1717–18; Mereworth in Kent, an imitation from Palladio of the celebrated Villa Capri, near Vicenza, completed in 1723; Drumlanrig Castle, Dumfriesshire, ‘a poor mixture of the classic and grotesque,’ and other mansions. By his patron, Lord Burlington, he was entrusted with the latter's designs for the improvement of his house in Piccadilly, and, if his own statement in the ‘Vitruvius Britannicus’ is worthy of credit, designed himself the centre gateway, the principal feature in the façade, in 1717. He was appointed architect to the Prince of Wales in 1725, and in the following year surveyor of the works of Greenwich Hospital.

Campbell died at his residence in Whitehall on 13 Sept. 1729, leaving no issue (Hist. Reg. 1729, p. 53; Probate Act Book, 1729). His will, as of Whitehall in the county of Middlesex, dated 16 Jan. 1721, was proved by his relict Jane on 18 Sept. 1729 (Reg. in P. C. C. 243, Abbott). His widow died in the parish of St. Nicholas Cole Abbey, London, in February 1738 (Will reg. in P. C. C. 32, Brodrepp). Campbell's ‘least pretentious designs are the best, his attempts at originality leading him into inharmonious combinations’ (Redgrave, Dictionary of Artists, 1878, pp. 68–9). Acting upon a hint received from Lord Burlington, he published three useful volumes of three hundred illustrations of English buildings, with the title, ‘Vitruvius Britannicus; or the British Architect; containing the plans, elevations, and sections of the regular Buildings, both publick and private, in Great Britain, with a variety of New Designs,’ folio, London, 1717–25. Of this work another edition, with a continuation by John Woolfe and James Gandon, both architects of repute, was published at London in five folio volumes, 1767–71. Shortly before his death Campbell was announced (Present State of the Republick of Letters, iii. 229) as being engaged upon the revision of an English edition of Palladio's ‘I quattro Libri dell'Architettura,’ but we do not find that it ever appeared.

[Walpole's Anecdotes of Painters (Wornum), ii. 696.]