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Notes
Dunkeld House was a property belonging to the Atholl family estate, built in the seventeenth century to designs by Sir William Bruce, and later demolished in the nineteenth century. The Adam office made a design for a gated entrance to the property for the Duke of Atholl in 1765, a year after he gained the title following the death of his uncle. There is a dated client’s copy of the design in the Blair Castle Collection. The design comprises an elegant Doric gateway with tall iron gates for carriages with a continuous iron frieze, and flanking pedestrian gates. The only difference between the design in the Soane collection and the design in the Blair Castle Collection, is that the client’s design has ram heads in the metopes of the pedimented frieze. The scheme was not carried out.
Literature: A.T. Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index, p. 10; D. King, The Complete Works of Robert & James Adam and Unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume 1, pp. 197, 199, 217; T. F. Henderson (ed.), ‘Murray, John, third duke of Atholl (1729–1774)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online [accessed 27 October 2023]
Louisa Catt, 2023
Level
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).