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  • image Adam vol.7/57

Reference number

Adam vol.7/57

Purpose

London: Parliament House (designs). Design for a rectangular panel showing two central figures in armour, one kneeling. On the left-hand side are soldiers with banners and on the right-hand side are several cannons.

Aspect

Elevation

Inscribed

Inscribed in pencil in a later hand Battle of Cressy. The black prince craves his father's blessing 2do"

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1762-63

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, brown wash with white heightening on brown washed paper173 x 465

Hand

Antonio Zucchi (attributed to)

Notes

This composition is one of the series of reliefs of contemporary and historic battles (Adam vol.7/47-59), all intended to be part of a programme of iconographical decoration for James Adam's Parliament House scheme of 1762/63. The drawings are probably all by Antonio Zucchi (1726-95), with his characteristic use of brown paper. The pencil identification and dating of each historical scene is probably in an early nineteenth-century hand.Although this is part of the battle series for the Parliament House project, the scene here and in Adam vol.7/56 and 58 is from medieval rather than eighteenth-century history. It depicts the Battle of Crecy in 1346, although the drawing is anachronistic in both costume and the inclusion of cannons. It is the counterpart to Adam vol.7/58. As in that drawing the figures are dressed in a combination of classical and early seventeenth-century costumes.

Level

Drawing

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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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