Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  [5] Preliminary design for the principal elevation of a building, 1791-92, executed to a variant design
  • image SM Adam volume 10/33

Reference number

SM Adam volume 10/33

Purpose

[5] Preliminary design for the principal elevation of a building, 1791-92, executed to a variant design

Aspect

Principal elevation of a three-storey, three-bay building comprising a central pedimented portico and a small rear tower with a pyramidal roof. The ground floor is rusticated with urns in niches either side of the entrance, the principal floor has tripartite windows with fanlights above, and there are fanlights in the outer bays at attic level with sphinxes above. The entire elevation is adorned with a mixture of figures within niches, fluted friezes, medallions, enclosed rosettes and balustrading

Scale

to a scale

Signed and dated

  • 1791-92
    datable to 1791-92

Medium and dimensions

Pencil and wash on laid paper (342x245)

Hand

Probably
Robert Adam

Literature

Bolton, 1922, p. 14
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).