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  • image SM Adam volume 40/32

Reference number

SM Adam volume 40/32

Purpose

[22] Finished drawing for a viewing tower, 1759-60, unexecuted

Aspect

Elevation of a four-storey, domed, circular tower, with domed corner turrets, a rusticated ground floor with a semicircular-headed entrance, a balustraded balcony and aedicular windows and doors on the first floor, and giant Corinthian columns which run through the first and second floors, and the third floor has a balustraded viewing platform supported by the giant Corinthian columns, and with a Venetian window within a relieving arch, and rectangular recesses

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

Tower for Kiddleston / for Lord Scarsdale

Signed and dated

  • 1759-1760
    date range: 1759-60

Medium and dimensions

Pen and wash within a single ruled border on laid paper (386 x 526)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly Agostino Brunias or Laurent-Benoît Dewez, with title inscriptions in the hand of William Adam

Watermark

V and fleur-de-lis within crowned cartouche and JVILLEDARY

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 19
Harris, 1987, p. 88
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

'Bob the Roman': Heroic Antiquity and the Architecture of Robert Adam, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 27 June - 27 September 2003; New York School of Interior Design Gallery, 29 September - 4 December 2004

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).