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  • image SM Adam volume 28/41

Reference number

SM Adam volume 28/41

Purpose

[11] Finished drawing for an axial section through the Library, c1760, unexecuted

Aspect

Axial section of a two-and-a-half-storey building, with the basement entrance from the south leading to a hall containing Doric screens and a chimneypiece flanked by niches. The ground storey entrance from the north, through an apsidal ended portico, leads to a hall with arched openings set behind Ionic screens, flanked by niches containing statuary. Above this there are ribbons and festoons, and the spandrels are ornamented with medallions, enclosed within wreaths surmounted by lion masks

Scale

bar scale of 2 inches to 10 feet

Inscribed

Section of one Side of the Library of one End of the Porch and the Hall in the Ground Story (in the hand of William Adam) / for the Royal College of Physicians at Edinburgh (underwritten in pencil) and some dimensions given

Signed and dated

  • c1760
    datable to c1760

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, wash and coloured washes within a single ruled border on laid paper (583 x 425)

Hand

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

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).