[17] Design for the east front, 1787, unexecuted

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Public buildings
  - King's College, Cambridge, designs for a chapel altar, new college buildings and a library, 1768-88, unexecuted (28)
    - Alternative design for the east front of the quadrangle, 1787, unexecuted (1)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 31/5

Purpose

[17] Design for the east front, 1787, unexecuted

Aspect

Elevation of a two-and-a-half-storey, three-bay building with a balustraded, hipped roof and rustication at the ground-storey level. There are three-quarter-height windows at the ground-storey level, and at the first-storey level there is a central, balustraded window set within an apse and behind an Ionic screen. The screen has a frieze of festoons and the semi-dome of the apse is ornamented with coffering. The apsidal window is flanked by full-height, balustraded, aedicula windows articulated by Ionic columns. In the upper register there are quarter-height windows. The building terminates in giant Corinthian pilasters, with capitals containing rosettes and a frieze ornamented with fluting and a central panel containing anthemia and calyx and an apron of guttae

Scale

bar scale of 1 3/8 inches to 10 feet

Inscribed

Elevation of the East / end of Kings College Cambridge (in the hand of William Adam, underwritten in pencil) / No. 19-

Signed and dated

1787
Robt Adam Architect 1787

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and wash within a single ruled border on laid paper (585 x 477)

Hand

Probably
Robert Adam, with part title inscription in the hand of William Adam

Verso

6 (crossed through) / 5 / 6 (crossed through) / 5

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, pp. 173-79; Index, p. 6
King, 2001, Volume II, p. 53
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).