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  • image SM Adam volume 29/86

Reference number

SM Adam volume 29/86

Purpose

[8] Unfinished design for a house, ND, not known to have been executed

Aspect

Longitudinal section of a three-and-a-half-storey house with a half-hipped roof and sunken basement. At the basement-storey level there are a number of barrel-vaulted spaces and a central room containing a chimneypiece. At the ground-storey level a bifurcated staircase extends to the first-storey level, and below this there is a barrel-vaulted passageway. Beyond, there is a room with a central chimneypiece flanked by doors, and with Tuscan screens at either end. The room above this has a coved ceiling and a central chimneypiece flanked by doorways, with preliminary designs for an overmantel mirror frame and girandoles. At the second-storey level there is a room with a chimneypiece and a window into the passage beyond. Steps up lead to a partitioned room, and the attic-storey level contains a room with a small fireplace. The principal front has a ground-floor portico, and this is surmounted by a Tuscan pilaster screen

Scale

bar scale of 1 3/4 inches to 10 feet

Inscribed

Section through the Earl of Hopetowns House in Harley Street (in the hand of William Adam) / Section through the Earl of Hopetowns house in Harley Street (pencil) / 29

Signed and dated

  • ND
    ND

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, pink and yellow coloured washes on laid paper (606 x 499)

Hand

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

Verso

4

Watermark

PVL

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index, p. 40
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).