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  • image SM Adam volume 51/7

Reference number

SM Adam volume 51/7

Purpose

[116] Design for a bridge, 1768

Aspect

Elevation of a bridge, composed of three segmental arches, with medallions in the spandrels, and surmounted by a balustrade, supported by four piers, articulated by Doric columns supporting small pediments, and containing urns, and the piers are surmounted by sculptures, one being a sphinx, and another being a putto riding a sea horse, and with abutments terminating in pedestals supporting lamps, and with a rough pencil-drawn annotation of an entablature in the bottom left-hand corner

Scale

bar scale of 1/5 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

1st Design (in pencil) / 1st Design for Mr Child (in pen in the hand of William Adam) and some measurements given

Signed and dated

  • 1768
    datable to 1768

Medium and dimensions

Pen and pencil on laid paper (1165 x 486)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly William Hamilton or J P Laurent, with addition to title inscription in the hand of William Adam

Verso

4 / 5 / (and on an affixed label) Robert Child Esqr / Bridges

Watermark

PVL

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 25
Rowan, 1988, p. 82
King, 2001, Volume II, p. 224
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).