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  • image SM Adam volume 28/39

Reference number

SM Adam volume 28/39

Purpose

[10] Finished drawing for a longitudinal section showing the south end of the library, c1760, unexecuted

Aspect

Longitudinal section of a two-and-a-half-storey building, with vaulted basement storey with a Doric colonnade and a central doorway flanked by sash windows. At the ground storey there is a central Palladian window, articulated by Ionic pilasters and flanked by niches containing statuary. Above this there are festoons, figurative roundels and a band of dentils beneath a coved ceiling. The central space is flanked by book rooms at the ground and first storeys

Scale

bar scale of 2 inches to 10 feet

Inscribed

Section of the North End of Library Shewing the Book Rooms the Sub Hall and Vaulted Rooms of Ground Floor (in the hand of William Adam, underwritten in pencil) / For the Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh and some dimensions given

Signed and dated

  • c1760
    datable to c1760

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, wash and coloured washes including pink and Naples yellow within a single ruled border on laid paper (531 x 389)

Hand

Possibly
Adam office hand, possibly Agostino Brunias, with part title inscription in the hand of William Adam

Verso

Library for Royal College of Physicians at Edin / 6

Notes

This drawing is incorrectly inscribed North End of Library, as it clearly shows the view to the south.

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 12
King, 2001, Volume II, p. 219
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).