A small but admirable piece of work which may safely be assigned to Jones is the water-gate of York House (Fig. 35). Its present rather forlorn situation at the bottom of Buckingham Street, Strand, gives no indication that it was an adjunct of the town house of the princely Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the “Steenie” of Charles I. York House, for so the place was called, had belonged to the Archbishops of York, but when it came into the hands of Buckingham, he pulled it down and built a large and temporary structure, apparently for the purpose of using it for state occasions. Within its walls he housed a magnificent collection of pictures and other works of art, purchased from Rubens.[23] Gerbier (who will be mentioned again later) was employed by the duke to design some of the new work at York House, and hence the water-gate has been attributed to him. But the fact that a drawing of it by Webb is included among the “Inigo Jones” drawings precludes this idea, for it is hard to imagine either Jones or Webb condescending to delineate any work of Gerbier’s. Apart from this it is improbable that Gerbier could have designed anything so good. That excellent mason and sculptor, Nicholas Stone, was employed upon its execution, and he put in a claim to the design, but Webb’s drawing is a sufficient answer to this pretension also. York House was sold in 1672 by the second duke, the “chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon” of Dryden, to a syndicate who pulled down the house, and covered the site with new buildings, leaving the water-gate as practically the sole relic of the old palace. Its appearance, backed by its newer neighbours, is well indicated in a drawing by Thomas Sandby, made about 1760 (reproduced as the frontispiece).