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  • image Adam vol.10/20

Reference number

Adam vol.10/20

Purpose

Unfinished capriccio showing the elevation of a large building composed as a porticoed central block of seventeen bays on steps, with large thermal window and relief sculpture above and flanking pavilions with thermal windows, and facades composed as triumphal arches.

Aspect

Elevationverso feint perpective sketches of buildings

Inscribed

Inscribed in pen Robt Adam Invt Roma 1756

Signed and dated

  • 1756

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, grey wash153 x 419

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Two pencil drawings showing the design for a three-bay lodge with pediment, having railings and gate pier to one side, and the design for a pyramid tomb with sarcophagus. These drawings may be later than that on the recto and show the sheet being reused. There are faint pencil suggestions for heightening the side pavilion.

Notes

In the opinion of A. A. Tait, this drawing relates in time and place or subject to those contained in Adam volume 55.In Adam volume 10, drawings 1-23 are in a section separated from the rest by blank pages, noted in pencil 'There follow 6 blank pages'. Virtually all the drawings in this section are schemes in plan and elevation for a Parliament building modelled, probably by Robert Adam, on James Adam's scheme of 1762/3. The plan in Adam vol.10/1, its elevation here in 10/20 and the unfinished elevation in 10/18 were all doubtless seen by the compiler of the volume as relevant to the understanding of the Parliament drawings. It is worth noting that like volume 55, this volume was intended to contain a collection very different from these sketch plans and elevations. The flyleaf is noted in ink and in an eighteenth-century hand, subsequently scored out, 'The Contents/Shields/Quivers/Other warlike Instruments/Instruments of Sacrifice/ Musical Instruments/Ensigns of Deitys/Lamps.This drawing shows the elevation to the plan in Adam vol.10/1 and like it is dated 1756.

Literature

Repr. J. Fleming, Robert Fleming and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, pl.48; A. Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, 2 vols., London, 1922, I, p.17.

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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