Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  [1] Finished drawing for the garden (south) front of the house, executed with alterations, 1771

Browse

  • image SM Adam volume 28/56
Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image
Print this image in A4 view  (icon indicating printer link)

Reference number

SM Adam volume 28/56

Purpose

[1] Finished drawing for the garden (south) front of the house, executed with alterations, 1771

Aspect

Elevation of a two-and-a-half-storey, seven-bay central block with a hipped roof, balustrading along the roof line crowned with sculpture, a portico of six giant Corinthian columns across the central five bays and supporting a pediment, and the basement is arcaded and with square windows within relieving arches in the end bays, and the first floor has five sculpture-filled niches and square relief panels under the portico, and Venetian windows in the end bays which are articulated by paired, fluted, giant Corinthian pilasters, and the whole has a fluted frieze. The central block is flanked on either side by a two-storey, seven-bay, balustraded link, with square windows within relieving arches in the basement, and rectangular windows behind an Ionic colonnade on the first floor, and beyond a two-storey, three-bay pavilion with a hipped roof, and balustrading along the roof line crowned with sculpture, and with square windows within relieving arches in the basement, and Venetian windows within relieving arches on the first floor where the bays are articulated by giant, fluted Corinthian pilasters

Scale

bar scale of 1/9 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Elevation of the House of Stow, the Seat of the Right Honorable Earl Temple afterwards Marquis of Buckingham (in the hand of William Adam)

Signed and dated

  • 1771
    datable to 1771

Medium and dimensions

Pen and wash on laid paper (1411 x 531)

Hand

Adam office draughtsman, possibly Joseph Bonomi, and title inscription in the hand of William Adam. Bolton suggests that the draughtsmanship of this drawing is by Giovanni Batista Borra, presumably as Borra had been responsible for the previous south front of the house. This is incorrect as it is unlike Borra's hand and he died in 1770, one year before the drawing was made.

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 29
Gibbon, 1977, p. 36
Beard, 1978, p. 49
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Original Drawings of Robert and James Adam, Kenwood House, London, 1953

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).