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  • image Adam vol.7/10
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Reference number

Adam vol.7/10

Purpose

London: Parliament House (designs for). Unfinished design with guidelines showing part of the floor pattern for a hall in three parts. The central rectangle is inlaid with royal titles and dates in Latin; either side are other patterns, columns and pilasters.

Aspect

Plan verso plan

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink with a calculation at top right side Lettered in pencil within the floor pattern AB REGNI EXPUGNATI DCCL. / AD. MDCC. LXXV / GEORGIUS REX. MAG. BRIT. FRAN. & HIB. REX

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1763

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil 189 x 265

Hand

James Adam

Verso

Pencil drawing of plan incorporating an oval hall

Notes

This drawing is part of a group of drawings of various floor patterns for James Adam's Parliament House scheme, see Adam vol.7/5-9, 11-12, 72 and 74-76. The detail of this aspect of the scheme would suggest that these drawings were executed in the 1763 period. The inlaid lettering in the floor here refers to the reign of George III and, puzzlingly, to 'AD. MDCCLXXV' (1775), possibly suggestingit is a revision of the scheme after James Adam returned to London at the end of 1763, and perhaps at the time of Robert Adam's 'Last Design' (see A. A. Tait, Robert Adam: drawings and imagination, Cambridge, 1993, pp.56-7). Even later, in 1793, James Adam was involved in making plans for Westminster (see J. M. Crook, The History of The King's Works, vol.VI, 1973, p.513).

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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.

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