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  • image Adam vol.7/106

Reference number

Adam vol.7/106

Purpose

London: Parliament House (designs for). Unfinished design, probably for a semi-circular doorhead, showing part of a lion, unicorn and a figure, with scrolling foliage. There is an Egg-and-Dart enrichment on the border.

Aspect

Elevation

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1762-63

Medium and dimensions

Pen, black chalk 150 x 270 with central vertical fold line

Hand

Antonio Zucchi (attributed to)

Watermark

Fleur de lys in double circle

Notes

This composition may have been intended to embellish the top of some large doorway in James Adam's Parliament House scheme of 1762/63. The source for the decoration can be found in similar drawings in Adam volume 26, which contains James Adam's collection of drawings after the antique (see also Adam vol.7/87).

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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