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  • image SM Adam volume 51/38
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Reference number

SM Adam volume 51/38

Purpose

[3] Preliminary design for a bridge, 1782, unexecuted

Aspect

Elevation of a bridge of three segmental arches supported by piers with friezes of festoons, and ornamented with enclosed rosettes in the spandrels. The largest central arch is balustraded, and flanked by piers supporting small circular domed lodges. The outer arches are surmounted by wedge-shaped walls, and terminate in piers alternately supporting a sphinx and an urn. The abutments are composed of iron fencing and terminate in circular pedestals ornamented with a figurative frieze, and surmounted by an urn. This pedestal is overdrawn on the left-hand side to show a lamp

Scale

bar scale of 2 inches to 10 feet

Inscribed

Unknown (in the hand of William Adam) (verso) Unknown

Signed and dated

  • 1782
    datable to 1782

Medium and dimensions

Pen and pencil on laid paper (593 x 493)

Hand

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

Watermark

PVL

Literature

King, 2001, Volume II, p. 227
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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).