Folio (467 x 355 mm.) Bound in contemporary quarter sheep over marbled boards, lightly rubbed, the leather corners abraded; engraved title leaf, etched address to the reader leaf, 10pp. of letterpress describing the paintings to be found in each of the principal rooms in the house, prices realised in ink in a contemporary hand (see below), unnumbered double-page geometrical plan of the "Garden, Park, and Plantation, of Houghton." (reworked to take into account changes to the grounds since 1735) followed by 27 engraved plates (numbered 1-35, including 8 double-page taking 2 numbers each, all mounted on stubs and all reprinted from the first edition of 1735); old, neat repair to the upper portion of the verso of the geometrical plan, one double-page plate (15/16) "Section of the Hall & Salone", shaved at the top edge to just within the plate mark, single plate (34) "East Front of Stables" shaved on either side to within the plate mark, in both cases there is no loss to the image, a very good. pleasing, unsophisticated copy.
Provenance: 1. Isaac Ware (1704-1766), architect and protége of Lord Burlington, with Ware’s contemporary engraved ornamental label "Published by I. Ware." 2. In all likelihood George Walpole (1730-1791) 3rd Earl of Orford, with a contemporary engraved armorial bookplate bearing the Orford coat-of-arms. 3. Thomas Weld-Blundell (1808-1887) with his nineteenth-century engraved armorial bookplate - all three affixed in descending order to the front pastedown, the first two appear to have been affixed to an original pastedown which has then been covered with a later pastedown bearing Weld-Blundell’s bookplate, with apertures into the new pastedown to enable viewing of the Ware and Orford plates. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, following the death of the last member of the Blundelll family, distant relatives of the Welds, their estates at Ince-Blundell passed to Thomas Weld on condition he adopted the “Blundell” name.

The first edition of The Plans, Elevations, And Sections ... published in 1735 contained no text to accompany the engraved plates of the exteriors and interiors of Houghton, and indeed the text supplied for this, the second edition, relates specifically to the collection of paintings and sculpture amassed at Houghton by Sir Robert Walpole and his son, also Robert: it is based, without acknowledgement, on the 1752 second revised edition of Horace Walpole’s Aedes Walpolianæ, first issued in 1748. By 1760 the information contained in the Aedes was out-of-date - in the interim a number of paintings from the collection had been sold at three auctions in 1748 and 1751 to pay off rising debts on the estate. In addition various of the remaining paintings and sculptures had been redistributed around the house and were no longer in the rooms previously listed - notwithstanding this, the extensive list provides a comprehensive overview of the collection’s unrivalled seventeenth century English, Flemish, Italian and French paintings and their original positions in the house, prior to the controversial and protracted sale of the bulk of the remaining paintings by George, the 3rd Earl of Orford and his agents to the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia in 1779 - a process which was documented with rising concern and eventual resignation in the diaries and correspondence of George’s uncle, Horace. Of especial interest in the present copy are the detailing of the prices obtained for each painting sold to the Empress, written in a neat hand, within a few years of the sale. A further manuscript note to the verso of the preliminary blank leaf notes, "The prices of the paintings as marked in this catalogue is [sic] taken from the European Magazine for February 1782 [pp. 95-99] which observes that these prices was [sic] paid to the Earl of Orford by the Empress Catherine of Russia, exactly as they stand in this book, and that the Editor [of the European Magazine] was favor’d with the account by Alderman [John] Boydell". Between 1775 and 1779 the engraver and print publisher, Boydell embarked on publishing a two-volume set of etchings and engravings of the Houghton pictures, titled The Houghton Gallery - however as number of the paintings had already left for St Petersburg the project remained incomplete.

Andrew Moore (editor). Houghton Hall: The Prime Minister, The Empress And The Heritage. 1996; Larissa Dukelskaya and Andrew Moore (editors). A Capital Collection: Houghton Hall And The Hermitage. 2002.
BAL Early Printed Books. 3584; Harris/Savage. British Architectural Books and Writers 1556-1785. 912.

Stock number: 1728