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  • image Adam vol.7/78
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Reference number

Adam vol.7/78

Purpose

London: Parliament House (designs for). Unfinished plan for an entrance portico of seven bays fronting a large doorway with a pilastered niche on either side and four columns in front, all reached by a double staircase in two flights.

Aspect

Plan verso details

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1762-63

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil 200 x 328

Hand

James Adam, Office of

Verso

Unfinished pencil sketch of a staircase and basement, part of the entrance elevation of the staircase on the recto. Both drawings are connected with James Adam's Parliament House scheme of 1762/3, possibly drawing by George Richardson (d. c.1813) for James Adam in Rome.

Watermark

Fleur de lys in double circle

Notes

This plan is the source for the part-elevation in Adam vol.7/77, and the guidelines are apparent. Like the drawing on the verso it is one of a number of designs for the entrance portico of James Adam's Parliament House scheme of 1762/3, possibly drawing by George Richardson (d. c.1813) for James Adam in Rome.
The portico shown most closely matches that found in Adam vol.1/28, which is possibly dated c.1768 and probably derived from James Adam's Parliament House drawings while in Rome in 1762/63 (see A. A. Tait, Robert Adam: drawings and imagination, Cambridge, 1993, pp.55-66). The plan was still 'improving' in 1763, no doubt encouraged by the arrival in 1762 of the Office of Works memorandum giving details of the existing buildings (see Adam vol.7/110). James Adam had written to his sister in London explaining, 'Now that my own plan is made out my curiosity to see the old is greater than ever' (Tait, op. cit., p.63). Nothing appears to survive to match this plan unless it is the two sketches of 1760 and references to the decoration of great and circular halls (see Adam vol.7/60).

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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