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  • image SM Adam volume 36/39

Reference number

SM Adam volume 36/39

Purpose

[2] Design for the ground storey of a house, c1783, unexecuted

Aspect

Plan of the ground storey of a five-by-five-bay building, with the central three bays of the west front receding, and containing a central entrance with a circular colonnaded portico. This leads to a hall with columned screens, and a rear apse flanked by niches. To the south of this there is a curved, bifurcated staircase, and to the north there is an apsidal-ended vestibule, set with columnar screens. The rooms to the north contain an eating room, ante-room and drawing rooms. To the south there is a bedchamber, dressing rooms, an oval powdering room and a water closet

Scale

bar scale of 1 3/4 inches to 10 feet

Inscribed

Principal Story of a town house for the Earl of Findlater (in the hand of William Adam, underwritten in pencil) / Portico / Hall / Vestibul / Eating room / Anti room / Drawing room / Drawing room / Bed Chamber / Dressing room / Dressing room / Waiting room / Powd.r room / Water Closet / Back stairs / Staircase / 22 (red ink) and some dimensions given

Signed and dated

  • c1783
    Adelphi / 27. August 1783

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and wash on laid paper (512 x 370)

Hand

Possibly
Office hand, possibly Robert Morison, with title inscription in the hand of William Adam

Verso

no 4

Watermark

J KOOL surmounted by fleur-de-lis within a crowned cartouche

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, pp. 103-4, Index, p. 45
Rowan, 1985, p. 138
King, 2001, Volume II, pp. 57, 102-6, 130
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.

Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).