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  • image Adam vol.7/116

Reference number

Adam vol.7/116

Purpose

London: Parliament House (designs for). Design for a relief panel showing a queen on a canopied dais, with a lion on one side and unicorn on the other. A figure is offering her the crown and sceptre, surrounded by other courtiers and soldiers, all in early seventeenth-century dress.

Aspect

Elevation

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1762-63

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, brown wash with white heightening on brown washed paper173 x 466

Hand

Antonio Zucchi

Notes

This is part of a set of four historical panels (Adam vol.7/114-117) that deal with aspects of British history and are by Antonio Zucchi (1726-95) for James Adam's Parliament House scheme of 1762/63. Presumably the grouping is deliberate and they all delineate important incidents in British history. This scene, which shows the queen refusing the crown, may be related to that depicted in Adam vol.7/114 in which Queen Philippa, wife of Edward III, is shown receiving the surrender of Calais in 1347.

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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