[5] Design for the south front of a house, 1785, unexecuted

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Country houses
  - Saint Hill House, Sussex, for Gibbs Crawfurd, variant designs for a house, 1785, unexecuted (13)
    - First design for a house, c1785, unexecuted (5)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 45/55

Purpose

[5] Design for the south front of a house, 1785, unexecuted

Aspect

Elevation of a two-and-a-half-storey, three-bay house, with a hipped roof surmounted by a stepped dome with an oculus. The central bay is projecting, and is surmounted by a plinth supporting a sphinx. At the ground-storey level there is a stepped entrance, set behind a Tuscan colonnaded screen. This is flanked by block pilasters with roundels ornamenting the frieze. The entrance is flanked by tripartite windows set behind Tuscan pilaster screens. At the first-storey level there is a central apse with a coffered ceiling, and this contains an entrance set behind a balustrade and flanked by paired Ionic pilasters. Beyond this there are aedicule windows, with half-height windows in the upper register, and the building terminates in block pilasters surmounted by paired Ionic pilasters

Scale

bar scale of 1 inch to 10 feet

Inscribed

South Front of a New Design for Saint Hill in Sussex / N.B the (sic) is a house in the Castle Stile for Mr Crawford (pencil)

Signed and dated

December 1785
Adelphi / 15.t Dec.r 1785

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and wash on laid paper (470 x 263)

Hand

Possibly
Office hand, possibly Robert Morison

Verso

Crawford (cropped)

Watermark

Fleur-de-lis within a crowned cartouche

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index, p. 27
King, 2001, Volume II, p. 133, pl. 21
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.

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