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  • image Adam vol.9/2
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Reference number

Adam vol.9/2

Purpose

Academic study for the plan of a circular building composed around a square court surrounded by a double colonnade, with four oval staircases and four openings with niches on either side on the elevations.

Aspect

Plan

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 2

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 1756.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen136 x 132

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

This is the first of several exercises in Adam volume 9 that are based on the composition of a circular building (see 9/3, 26 and 38; also 9/132 and 220, both dating from post-1758) such as a Maritime Theatre at Tivoli, Italy. They appear in a variety of later Adam designs, of which the most impressive, in the form of a country house, was Wyke House, Sion Hill at Isleworth, Surrey of c.1779. A plan sketched in chalk in Adam vol.55/128 combines the ideas that appear here and in Adam vol.9/3, which emphasises the connection between volumes 9 and 55 (another example of which can be seen in the oval schemes on the verso of 55/29). The corrections in pencil that change the internal court to an octagonal form can be compared with the scheme in 55/128.

Level

Drawing

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).