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  • image SM Adam volume 10/135

Reference number

SM Adam volume 10/135

Purpose

[34] Alternative preliminary designs for a folly, c1783, unexecuted

Aspect

Rough elevations of three alternate follies. The top design has a large arch flanked by two-storey circular towers surmounted by square towers; beyond which is a three-storey, three-bay crenellated square tower; then a three-bay crenellated link containing arches; then a four-storey, circular tower with an arched door, surmounted by slit windows, and with a monopteral colonnade around the upper register, which is surmounted by a conical roof; then a four-bay, two-storey link, with arches on the ground and first storeys, and the bays articulated by buttresses; and the structure is terminated with a three-storey circular tower with a conical roof surmounted by a small dome. The lower left-hand design has a two-storey central carriage arch; flanked by single-bay circular towers with arched windows, surmounted by square towers with slit windows, and surmounted by a single-storey, crenellated square tower, with a slit window within a relieving arch, and surmounted by a small pepper pot turret; this central block is flanked by single-storey, three-bay crenellated arcades, terminating in two-storey, tapering circular towers with arched windows, which have bows to each side on the ground storey, and each is surmounted by a weather vane. The lower right-hand design has a central carriage arch, surmounted by an upper register containing three arched windows, and flanked by two-storey circular towers with slit and cross windows; and this central block is flanked by single-storey arcaded links, one-and-a-half-storey, single-bay circular towers, and a further single-storey arcaded link on the left-hand side

Scale

not to scale

Signed and dated

  • 1783
    datable to c1783

Medium and dimensions

Pen and pencil on sugar paper (382 x 245)

Hand

Robert Adam

Literature

King, 2001, Volume 2, p. 243
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

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).