James Wyatt

James Wyatt
Mezzotint after a portrait by Wyatt's son Matthew Cotes Wyatt
Born	(1746-08-03)3 August 1746 Blackbrook Farm, Weeford
Died	4 September 1813(1813-09-04) 2 miles east of Marlborough in carriage accident
Nationality	English
Occupation	Architect
Buildings	Fonthill Abbey

James Wyatt RA (3 August 1746 – 4 September 1813) was an English architect, a rival of Robert Adam in the neoclassical style and neo-Gothic style.

Wyatt spent six years in Italy, 1762–68, in company with Richard Bagot of Staffordshire, who was Secretary to the Earl of Northampton's embassy to the Venetian Republic. In Venice, Wyatt studied with Antonio Visentini (1688–1782) as an architectural draughtsman and painter. In Rome he made measured drawings of the dome of St. Peter's Basilica, "being under the necessity of lying on his back on a ladder slung horizontally, without cradle or side-rail, over a frightful void of 300 feet".

Back in England, his selection as architect of the proposed Pantheon or "Winter Ranelagh" in Oxford Street, London, brought him almost unparalleled instant success. His brother Samuel was one of the principal promoters of the scheme, and it was doubtless due to him that the designs of a young and almost unknown architect were accepted by the Committee. When the Pantheon was opened in 1772, their choice was at once endorsed by the fashionable public: Horace Walpole pronounced it to be "the most beautiful edifice in England".

Externally it was unremarkable (illustration, right), but the classicising domed hall surrounded by galleried aisles and apsidal ends, was something new in assembly rooms, and brought its architect immediate celebrity. The design was exhibited at the Royal Academy, private commissions followed, and at the age of 26 Wyatt found himself a fashionable domestic architect and on the 27 August 1770 an Associate of the Royal Academy. His polished manners secured him friends as well as patrons among the great, and when it was rumoured that he was about to leave the country to become architect to Catherine II of Russia, a group of English noblemen is said to have offered him a retaining fee of £1,200 to remain in their service. His major neoclassical country houses include Heaton Hall near Manchester (1772), Heveningham Hall in Suffolk (circa 1788-99), and Castle Coole in Ireland, as well as Packington Hall in Staffordshire, the home of the Levett family for generations, and Dodington Park in Gloucestershire for the Codrington family. On the 15 February 1785 Wyatt was elected an Academician of the Royal Academy, his diploma work being a drawing of the Darnley Mausoleum.