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  • image SM Adam volume 47/7
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Reference number

SM Adam volume 47/7

Purpose

[24] Finished drawing for the Opera House, showing the Haymarket (east) entrance and principal staircase, oval ballroom and adjoining assembly room, c1789, unexecuted

Aspect

Axial section of the opera house from east to west, as SM Adam volume 28/21, but with minor alterations. The roof line is altered and the east wing extended, with an additional colonnaded room above the stairwell. Within the ballroom the suspended lamps are replaced with tripods bearing oil lamps, set between the columns. Figurative roundels ornament the spandrels between the entrances and apses. At the lower level a central arched entrance is introduced and the stove is omitted

Scale

bar scale of 1 inch to 5 feet

Inscribed

Sections across the Opera House shewing the Grand stairways & entrance to the Ballrooms with a section of the Oval Ballroom & one and [?] of the Assembly room (in pencil) / no 7 (in pencil)

Signed and dated

  • c1789
    c1789

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, wash and coloured washes including pink and verdigris within a single ruled border on laid paper (941 x 597)

Hand

Possibly
Office hand, possibly Robert Morison or Daniel Robertson

Verso

Notation, modern curatorial

Watermark

PVL

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 40
Sheppard, 1960, Volume XXIX, (i), p. 249
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Robert Adam, The Creative Mind: from the Sketch to the Finished Drawing, Sir John Soane's Museum, 4 October 1996 - 1 March 1997; The Frick Collection, New York, December 1997 - April 1998; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, May - June 1998; The Octagon Museum, Washington, July 1998 - January 1999; Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, February - March 1999

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).