James Thomas Knowles

James Thomas Knowles (1806 — 1884) [His gravestone at West Norwood Cemetery ( [http://www.fownc.org/newsletters/no59.shtml Friends of West Norwood Cemetery] ).] was a British architect with an extensive practice in building upper-class houses in the Italianate manner more familiar in the work of Sir Charles Barry. His designs submitted in the competition for the new Houses of Parliament lost to Barry's design. In London, Knowles built the confident and technically assured palazzo at 15, Kensington Palace Gardens (1854). [Today it is the official residence of the ambassador of Finland.] Together with his son, (Sir) James Thomas Knowles (1831–1908), he was responsible for the Grosvenor Hotel.

His vast Italianate mansion at Silverton Park, Devon, for the fourth Earl of Egremont, who had inherited the title but not the great family seat, Petworth in Sussex, determined to build a rival structure. It was not fully complete when the earl died in 1845, and after a house sale in 1892 dispersed its contents, [Over a century later, a brief, unillustrated catalogue description in the 1892 sale inspired the creation of the forgery of an ancient Wgyptian portrait head, the so-called "Amarna Princess".] it was demolished; only the stables remain.

One of his sketchbooks is in the library of the Royal Institute of British Architects. [ [http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra/searches/subjectView.asp?ID=P48620 National Archives] .]

His son, Sir James Knowles (1831 - 1908), was an architect in partnership with his father, and editor of the "Contemporary Review", 1870–77.

Notes

References

*Curl, James Stevens. "A Dictionary of Architecture".

Further reading

*Metcalf, Priscilla, "James Knowles: Victorian Editor and Architect" (Oxford: Clarendon Press) 1980, also contains some further biographical information on the elder Knowles.