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  • image Adam vol.9/4
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Reference number

Adam vol.9/4

Purpose

Academic study for a small plan of a square building with a circular colonnaded centre, three staircases, one of which is circular, and a large projecting portico of four bays on steps.

Aspect

Plan

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 4

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56.

Medium and dimensions

Pen70 x 64

Hand

Laurent-Benoît Dewez (attributed to)

Notes

There are several variations on this scheme in Adam volume 9 (see 9/25, 55 and 68); among the drawings dating from 1758, Adam vol.9/229 is a domestic version of the plan and shows how it has been developed in the process from theory to practice. A similar plan was used by the brothers in their early schemes for Shelburne House, Hyde Park Corner, London of 1765 (see Adam vol.7/158, which also incorporated the four-staircase formula found in Adam vol.9/2). Comparable compositions by Robert Adam can also be found in Adam vol.55/180. The incisive style of draughtsmanship here is unlike that associated with Robert Adam of c.1755 and is closer to that of Laurent-Benoít Dewez (1731-1812) in his Italian drawings of this period.

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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