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  • image Adam vol.9/14
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Reference number

Adam vol.9/14

Purpose

Academic study for the plan of a large public building, possibly a church, with a longitudinal plan: a central octagon with colonnade entered at one end through a projecting five-bay portico, and at the other end through a three-bay opening with side doors and spiral staircases on either side of a large portico (the latter now trimmed off the drawing)

Aspect

Plan

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 14

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen225 x 186, bottom of drawing trimmed

Hand

Robert Adam

Watermark

bird on monti within circle

Notes

The hatching technique is similar to that found on the pavilion designs (see Adam vol.9/7, 11, 12) and the complicated church-like composition links it to Adam vol.9/8. This drawing is a larger variation of the sketch plan found in Adam vol.9/15; both can be related to a similar, incomplete plan in Adam vol.55/131 and to the plan in pen in Adam vol.55/126. The composition is in the style of Italian church design of the mid-sixteenth century, with a characteristic mixture of longitudinal and centralised plans that Robert and James Adam were certainly familiar with. There is a version of this drawing by Laurent-Benoít Dewez (1731-1812) in his drawings in the Rijksarchief, Brussels (see Dewez 1/14).

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).