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  • image SM Adam volume 31/27

Reference number

SM Adam volume 31/27

Purpose

[2] Finished drawing for the elevation of the north front of Edinburgh High School, 1776, unexecuted

Aspect

Front (north) elevation of a two-storey, seven-bay building with a central clock tower. There is a simple arched entrance with steps. The first floor comprises a central Venetian window flanked by Tuscan columns supporting an entablature with a frieze decorated with enclosed rosettes, and a pediment. This is repeated in the outer bays but with plinths surmounted by statues instead of pediments. There is a continuous moulded string course below the first floor. The clock tower is adorned with a fluted frieze and pediment on the first tier, followed by a clock with a moulded cornice above, the third tier comprises an Ionic columned screen followed by a narrower top tier, with a domed roof and weathervane

Scale

bar scale of 1 inch to 10 feet

Inscribed

North Front of a New Design for the High School of Edinburgh ~

Signed and dated

  • 8/10/1776
    Adelphi Octr 8th 1776

Medium and dimensions

Pen and pencil on laid paper (613x501)

Hand

Possibly
Adam office hand, possibly Joseph Bonomi

Watermark

Footed P

Literature

Bolton, II, 1922, p. 11
Further literary references in 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).