Paxton House

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Paxton House

Paxton House is a Scottish country house in Paxton in the Scottish Borders , southwest of Berwick-upon-Tweed in the Tweed Valley. It was built between 1757 and 1766 for Patrick Home of Billie by brothers James and John Adam . Her more famous third brother, Robert Adam , was commissioned to design the interior around 1773. Paxton House is one of the best preserved neo Palladian buildings in Scotland from the mid-18th century.

Paxton Picture Gallery

The special feature of the house is a picture gallery, which can only be found in this form in very few properties in Great Britain . It is the largest private picture gallery in Scotland and one of the most ambitious projects of this kind in any British country house. Typically, no separate rooms were designed for pictures, but their owners filled the walls of the main rooms of their property with them. The picture gallery in Paxton owes itself to the fact that Patrick Home first sold Paxton Hall to his nephew Ninian Home and his successor as owner, George Home, left a collection of pictures and books on his death in 1808. George Home, Ninian Home's brother, was 74 years old at the time and had been practicing as a lawyer in Edinburgh until then . However, this age could not prevent him from commissioning the architect Robert Reid to plan an extension to house the paintings, which was completed after about five years. In shape it is only comparable to the extension of Corsham Court , Wiltshire , constructed by Capability Brown in 1764 , and the gallery in Newby Hall , Yorkshire designed by Robert Adam in 1767 . The best-known example of this type is the Dulwich Gallery , which John Soane built from 1812. The Paxton Picture Gallery is currently run by the National Galleries of Scotland , which has a collection of mainly Scottish paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries.

Web links

Commons : Paxton House  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Alistair Rowan: The Paxton Picture Gallery . In: National Galleries of Scotland: The Picture Gallery at Paxton House . 2003, p. 7.
  2. ^ Alistair Rowan: The Paxton Picture Gallery . In: National Galleries of Scotland: The Picture Gallery at Paxton House . 2003, p. 8.

Coordinates: 55 ° 45 ′ 40 "  N , 2 ° 6 ′ 35"  W.