Thomas Pitt, 1st Baron Camelford - Dilettante

Dilettante

From March 1762 Pitt lived at Twickenham, playfully calling his house the ‘Palazzo Pitti.’ He was then the neighbour of Horace Walpole, who recognised his skill in Gothic architecture, and went so far as to call him ‘my present architect.’ On the death in 1779 of William Stanhope, 2nd Earl of Harrington, he bought the lease of Petersham Lodge (beneath Richmond Park, but now demolished and the grounds included in the park boundaries), and he purchased the fee-simple in 1784 from the crown, an act of parliament being passed for that purpose. In 1790 it was sold by him to the Duke of Clarence.

Pitt also built Camelford House, fronting Oxford Street, at the top of Park Lane, London; and as a member of the Dilettanti Society, to which he had been elected on 1 May 1763, he proposed in February 1785 that the shells of two adjoining houses constructed by him in Hereford Street should be completed by the society for a public museum, but financial considerations put a stop to the project.

He interested himself in the porcelain manufactory at Plymouth, where they used the white saponaceous clay found on his land in Cornwall. Angelica Kauffmann wrote to him on the free importation into England by artists of their own studies and designs. Pitt was a friend of Mary Delany, to whom he gave for her lifetime portraits of Sir Bevil Grenville, his wife, and his father, and he proposed to John Maurice, Count of Brühl that they should jointly assist Thomas Mudge in his plans for the improvement of nautical chronometers. The wainscoting of the stalls in Carlisle Cathedral, where his uncle Charles Lyttelton was bishop, was designed by him.