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  • image Adam vol.9/20
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Reference number

Adam vol.9/20

Purpose

Unfinished academic study for the plan of a villa with four symmetrical elevations, each with a central apse and circular corner rooms opening onto an octagon with columned entrances.

Aspect

Plan

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 20

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56.

Medium and dimensions

Black chalk, pencil126 x 163

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

This drawing is part of a group of pencil and chalk exercises by Robert Adam on the theme of a small pavilion, the others being Adam vol.9/18 and 19, although this drawing is less finished than the other two drawings. They are all similar in composition and scale to the hatched schemes at Adam vol.9/11 and 12, and all can be seen as developments from Adam vol.9/5. The draughtsmanship here is firmer and less precise, and both in this aspect and in its composition it may be compared with the larger scheme in Adam vol.9/10. There is another similar but smaller centralised scheme in Adam vol.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).