A pen and ink and wash drawing showing a Corinthian temple with a triangular pediment, projecting portico and four columns. The drawing is numbered 30 in the upper right corner and a scale is shown in pencil at the bottom of the sheet.

This drawing provides the sole instance of a surviving design by the King which is specifically related to a documented - though unexecuted - building. It was engraved as one of the plates included at the end of Chambers’s Treatise (1759); the explanatory text to the 1791 edition of the Treatise states that it was ‘made for Her late Royal Highness the Princess Dowager of Wales and proposed to be erected in the gardens at Kew’. The plate was dedicated to Thomas Worsley, Surveyor of the King’s Works, but - uniquely in his publication - Chambers did not inscribe it as architect. An early impression of the plate, formerly in Worsley’s collection, bears an inscription (possibly in Worsley’s hand) stating that the design was due to the Prince of Wales: Invenit Walliae Princeps Celsissimus & dedit. The King’s temple is close to a number of the garden buildings erected at Kew, to the designs of William Chambers. The reason that it was not built is unknown. It is intriguing that this temple design was published four years before the designs for the actual buildings were issued, in Chambers’s Kew (1763). The numerous compass points (down the centre, across the base of the temple, and in the column to left of centre) indicate the painstaking construction of the drawing.

Catalogue entry adapted from George III & Queen Charlotte: Patronage, Collecting and Court Taste, London, 2004