(b G?teborg, Sweden, 23 Feb 1723; d London, 8 March 1796). English architect and writer, of Scottish descent.

The son of a Scottish merchant trading in Sweden, Chambers was educated in Ripon, Yorkshire, and returned to Sweden at the age of 16 to train as a merchant in that country's East India Company. Between 1740 and 1749 he made three voyages to the East, passing away the tedium of the journeys by studying 'modern languages, mathematics and the fine arts, but chiefly civil architecture'. This background placed Chambers in a unique situation as far as his future career in England was concerned. By inclination he was a continental, and in 1749 he went to Paris, as any Swedish architect would have done, and sought instruction in architecture. He entered Jacques-Fran?ois Blondel's influential Ecole des Arts, a progressive educational body that trained the finest Parisian architects of the first generation of Neo-classicists. Late in 1750 Chambers moved on to Rome, where he set himself up as a privately funded student. There he seems to have maintained contacts with the Acad?mie de France, and for a while he lived in the same house as Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who befriended those artists whose work was in the vanguard of Neo-classicism. Nevertheless, Chambers was too astute to ignore the visiting coteries of English travellers and milordi. He made friendships with certain noblemen that were to bear fruit in the years to come, and Robert Adam, who arrived in Rome in 1755, recorded that Chambers was considered 'a Prodigy for Genius, for Sense & good taste'. Even so, Chambers had not yet decided to establish himself in London; indeed in 1754 he considered taking up Frederick the Great's offer to employ him at Sanssouci, Potsdam.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

The Concise Grove Dictionary of Art. Copyright © 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.