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  • image Adam vol.9/3
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Reference number

Adam vol.9/3

Purpose

Academic study for the plan of a circular building having a circular central court with niches and columns, two staircases and a projecting three-bay portico on steps. In the bottom right of the sheet is part of a small circular plan.

Aspect

Plan

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 3

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen130 x 120, bottom corners torn

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

This plan is a more complicated version of that shown in Adam vol.9/2, with a reworking of two of the oval staircase spaces unresolved. As an academic exercise, it probably belongs with Adam vol.9/25 and 26. Among the drawings executed after 1758, in Adam vol.9/220 there is a more developed, domestic version of this scheme, where the central court has become an antechamber 20 feet in diameter. Another scheme in Adam vol.9/186 that is dated 1760 and signed by Robert Adam, probably gives the date for all such studies.

Literature

Rep. A. A. Tait, Robert Adam: drawings and imagination, Cambridge, 1993, p.27, fig.24.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

'Bob the Roman': Heroic Antiquity and the Architecture of Robert Adam, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 27 June - 27 September 2003; New York School of Interior Design Gallery, 29 September - 4 December 2004

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).