Isaac Ware - Architectural Career

Architectural Career

He was apprenticed to Thomas Ripley, 1 August 1721, and followed him in positions in the Office of Works, but his mentor in design was Lord Burlington. Ware was a member of the St. Martin's Lane Academy, which brought together many of the main figures in the English Rococo movement, among them Louis François Roubiliac, who sculpted Ware's portrait bust about 1741.

Although he held various posts with the Office of Works between 1728 and his death, including Secretary, a position previously held by Nicholas Hawksmoor, Ware's major works were for private patrons. Aside from Chesterfield House, Westminster, (1747–52; demolished 1937) with its Palladian exterior and rococo interior details he built a small number of country houses, most of which have been subsequently remodelled or demolished. Clifton Hill House, Bristol, and Wrotham Park, Hertfordshire survive, Clifton Hill House, built in 1746 –50, is a Palladian villa, a type Ware also used for two houses in Scotland in the next ten years, both with service wings linked to the main house by passages. At Wrotham (1756) the central block was flanked by winks ending in octagonal pavilions. He also engaged in speculative building in the West End of London.

Ware was dissatisfied with the first English language edition of Andrea Palladio's I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura, translated by Giacomo Leoni), and in particular with Leoni's illustrations. In 1738 Ware published his translation illustrated with his own careful engravings. Ware's version of the Four Books of Architecture remained the best English translation into the twentieth century in the opinion of Howard Colvin.

"Having thoroughly assimilated Palladian theory", wrote Colvin "he looked beyond it, and in the 1740s himself helped to dissolve the dictatorship of taste that Burlington imposed in the 1720s.", In 1756 he published A Complete Body of Architecture a wide-ranging work intended to "supply the place of all other books". It was described by John Summerson as "ably compiled, reflecting very fairly the solid, thoughtful competence of its author's executed works".