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  • image SM Adam volume 30/60

Reference number

SM Adam volume 30/60

Purpose

[4] Finished drawing for the building and interior decoration, c1772

Aspect

Longitudinal section through a rectangular building as Adam volume 30/62, showing the screened apsidal end on the left-hand side, and three screened recessed areas, each containing three windows, and surmounted by a large fanlight forming arched dormers in the barrel-vaulted ceiling, and with a door at each end of the recessed, and urn-filled niches in the two piers to either side of the central recess, and the decorative scheme includes a mirror in the form of a repeating Venetian window in the apse, which is articulated by terms, figurative medallions and tablets over the doors and niches, vertical compartments of arabesques, a frieze of alternating enclosed cameos and peltoid shields, columns screening the recesses with lotus capitals, and the ceiling is ornamented with fans, griffons, bands of anthemia, bands of arabesques, and bands of rosettes enclosed within connected Greek crosses

Scale

bar scale of 3 1/2 inches to 10 feet

Inscribed

Inside of Loyds Coffee House (in the hand of William Adam)

Signed and dated

  • c1772
    datable to c1772

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, wash and coloured washes including verdigris and pink within a single ruled border on laid paper (938 x 640)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly Joseph Bonomi, with title inscription in the hand of William Adam

Watermark

D&CBLAUW IV and XD&CB within a cartouche

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 41
The Lloyds log, 1955, p. 10
King, 2001, Volume II, p. 57
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Original Drawings of Robert and James Adam, Kenwood House, London, 1953
Robert Adam's London, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 30 November 2016 - 11 March 2017

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).