Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  London: Parliament House (designs for). Design for a long rectangular panel showing a frieze-like procession of captives and soldiers leading to a figure on a throne with canopy at the right-hand side. Soldiers and spoils are also depicted.
  • image Adam vol.7/62

Reference number

Adam vol.7/62

Purpose

London: Parliament House (designs for). Design for a long rectangular panel showing a frieze-like procession of captives and soldiers leading to a figure on a throne with canopy at the right-hand side. Soldiers and spoils are also depicted.

Aspect

Elevation

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink in a contemporary hand Town in War Great Hall

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1762-63

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, brown wash with white heightening, partly oxidised, on brown washed paper 160 x 779 with two vertical fold lines

Hand

Antonio Zucchi (attributed to)

Notes

This composition is part of a series of designs for James Adam's Parliament House scheme of 1762/63 that depict scenes and aspects of general life (Adam vol.7/60-67). Several are noted as being for either the Great (as here) or Circular Hall of the scheme; the plan in Adam vol.7/3 depicts three large and several smaller circular halls. Presumably the final plan for the scheme of 1763, never fully finished and now lost, indicated such chambers (see A. A. Tait, Robert Adam: drawings and imagination, Cambridge, 1993, p.64). The battle and historical drawings are all similar in draughtsmanship and were probably made by Antonio Zucchi (1726 - 95) in the winter of 1762/63.
This composition was probably intended to contrast with Adam vol.7/60, Town in peace, in some proposed great hall of the Adam Parliament House. The figures are shown in a modified classical costume.

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).