(1734 - 1790), architect, yr. bro. of Robert Mylne; emigrated to America 1772; returned to Ireland; engineer to Dublin Water Works.
1755 - 8 [in Paris, Mar. - Dec. 1754] Civitavecchia (Jan. 1755), Rome (Jan. 1755 - Jul. 1757), Civitavecchia, Leghorn, Pisa, Florence (Aug.), Bologna (two weeks), Ferrara, Venice (25 Sep.), Padua, Vicenza (Nov. - Dec. 1757), Montebello, Bassano, Venice, Castelfranco, Treviso, Vicenza (by 13 Jan. 1758), Montebello, Verona
William Mylne's travels in Italy provide an interesting account of the education of a British architect.1 In Paris from early 1754, Mylne followed a course of instruction under J.-F. Blondel, similar to that of William Chambers. At Rome, although he worked for most of 1755 under one of the pensioners from the Ecole de France (introduced to him by Chambers), Mylne's progress soon slipped behind that of his elder brother, and by the time Robert won the Concorso Clementino in 1758, William had left for home.
Mylne's eclipse by his elder brother is also attested by the surviving letters. A frequent correspondent both before Robert's arrival in Paris and after separating from his brother, there is only one letter by William (dated 29 September 1756) from the period when they were together at Rome in the Via Condotti; in it he apologises for his long silence and expresses his desire to return to Scotland, adding that Robert has no such desire to leave Rome. Perhaps the brothers' poverty (each received an allowance of £30 per annum from their father), or the Italian climate weighed more heavily on William than on Robert; writing from Vicenza on 13 January 1758, William described himself as heat-shrunken, toothless and squinting. The weary Mylne suffered one further indignity on his journey homeward, narrowly avoiding being pressed by German troops near the Tyrolean border, by destroying all his documentation and passing as an Italian in February 1758.
William Mylne's studies of buildings in the Veneto provide a stark contrast to the activities of his brother Robert just over a year later. Whereas Robert went to little effort in recording the work of Palladio, William was assiduous in his inspection of buildings by both Palladio and Scamozzi and made some of the most thorough studies of them of any later eighteenth-century travelling Briton.
In Rome William Mylne knew James Nevay, Solomon Delane and James Maxwell, while Nathaniel Dance painted his portrait.2 On 13 December 1755 Robert Adam had noted the presence of Mylne in Rome as one who had studied in France and thus had 'that abominable taste to perfection',3 but thereafter Adam's venomous rivalry was all to be directed at the greater perceived threat of Robert ('Blackfriars') Mylne.
1. See Mylne letters MSS. 2. Dance letters MSS (N. Dance, 17 Dec. 1760). 3. Fleming, Adam, 188.
F. S.