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Preliminary designs for alterations to the house, unexecuted, October 1778 (3)

Notes

The title inscriptions are written in the hand of William Adam (1738-1822), and the family name of Tower spelt incorrectly as Towers. The fact that each contains a line before the name Towers, rather than the first name, suggests that at the time the volumes of Adam drawings were compiled there was some confusion as to whether Thomas Tower or Christopher Tower had commissioned the drawings. We know that Thomas Tower made alterations to the Belvedere Tower in the park in 1752, but there is also evidence that he had approached Adam shortly before his death (see scheme note). The work was continued by Christopher Tower. The Belvedere tower has now been demolished and only the mound and steps survive.

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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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Contents of Preliminary designs for alterations to the house, unexecuted, October 1778 (3)