Daniel Robertson (architect)
British architect
Daniel Robertson (died 1849) was a British architect active in Britain and Ireland during the first half of the 19th century.
Personal life
Robertson was born in Charleston, South Carolina the son of Andrew Robertson (1733–1791) and his wife Helen (née Crawford) who had died in 1778, which is presumably the year of Daniel's birth.
He married Amelia Helen Clarke in 1808 and had twelve children including Arthur.
Career
Robertson may have worked under Robert Adam in London and along with his brother Alexander, Robertson was involved in the construction of warehouses for the West India Docks for the youngest Adam brother, William, a builder and developer in 1800.
Both Robertson brothers were finally declared bankrupt in 1817 and ultimately, Adam refused to work with the Robertsons because of their irresponsibility and dishonesty and went as far as signing a formal undertaking breaking off the relationship in 1821.
Later he worked at Kew and Oxford. Robertson was an early exponent of the Norman Revival, designing both St Clement's Church, Oxford and St Swithun's parish church in Kennington, Berkshire (now in Oxfordshire) in this style as early as 1828.
Move to Ireland
Robertson then moved to Ireland in the early 1830s, where he had considerable success and carried out commissions for notable country houses particularly in the southeastern part of the country. His work was in both the Neoclassical style and then in the Gothic Revival style of the 1830s with which he may be most associated.
By the 1840s while working on Powerscourt House, he was said by Lord Powerscourt to be "always in debt and…used to hide in the domes of the roof of the house' to escape the Sheriff's officers who pursued him".
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This entry incorporates text from “Daniel Robertson (architect)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.