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  • image Adam vol.7/59

Reference number

Adam vol.7/59

Purpose

London: Parliament House (designs for). Design for a rectangular panel showing a battle scene outside the gate of a fortified town. On the right is a figure in uniform dying on a bed beneath tree canopy, with a cannon to one side. The figure is surrounded by weeping figures in contemporary dress.

Aspect

Elevation

Inscribed

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1762-63

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, brown wash with white heightening, partly oxidised, on brown washed paper 162 x 779 with three vertical fold lines

Hand

Antonio Zucchi (attributed to)

Notes

This composition is in 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.
This scene is contemporary with the eighteenth-century battle scenes in the series and can be compared with the iconography used in Adam vol.7/52 for the surrender of Montreal. This possibly depicts another incident in that campaign, where General Wolf was fatally wounded in battle.

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.

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