Chambers, SIR WILLIAM

Chambers, SIR WILLIAM, architect, was born of a Scotch family at Stockholm in 1726, but was brought up in England. At first a sailor, he soon turned to the study of architecture in Italy and at Paris. He rose rapidly, and as early as 1757 was employed by Augusta, Princess-dowager of Wales, to construct the well-known semi-Roman and oriental buildings in Kew Gardens. The king of Sweden made him a knight of the Polar Star. Somerset House (1776) was his design, which Fergusson pronounces 'the greatest architectural work of the reign of George III.' His Treatise of Civil Architecture (1759) was successful, but his absurdly pretentious and ignorant Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772) justly covered him with ridicule. Chambers enjoyed the friendship of Johnson, Reynolds, and Garrick, and died in London, March 8, 1796.