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  • image Adam vol.7/89
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Reference number

Adam vol.7/89

Purpose

Unfinished design for the base of a column showing alternative forms of decoration, fluted and unfluted, with oak leaf and Guilloche tori. Next to this is a quadrant plan with dimensions.

Aspect

Elevation, plan

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1762-63

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, black chalk 214 x 377

Hand

James Adam, Office of

Notes

This drawing provides alternative forms for the decoration of the base of a column, presumably from James Adam's Parliament House scheme, or possibly his royal theatre scheme, see Adam vol.7/184. There is another, less complete variation in Adam vol.7/100, and a detail in Adam vol.7/99.
Amongst the collection of Albani drawings that James Adam had purchased for George III in 1762 is a sheet of decorated column bases from the Forum of Augustus in Rome, which may have served as a model for this drawing (see Campbell 2004, I, p.235).

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).