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  • image Adam vol.9/22
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Reference number

Adam vol.9/22

Purpose

Academic study for a plan for a large public building with an entrance courtyard with a square porticoed pavilion in the centre. The courtyard opens through a columned exedra into a large apsidal hall that has circular columned pavilions on either side. At the top of the sheet is a profile of a cornice.

Aspect

Plan, detailverso elevations and plan

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 22

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56.

Medium and dimensions

Pen258 x 214

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Pen drawings showing two alternative elevations and a plan for a large niche of five bays, with small wings of coupled columns. One has a coffered niche between pedimented archways; a variation of this is found in Adam vol.55/63. Below this, the other elevation is designed as a complex, double triumphal arch, with attic and sculpture above several openings; variations on the triumphal arch theme are found in Adam vol.55/162 and 179. The plan and elevations are loosely connected with the central section of the plan on the recto.

Watermark

done on monti within circle

Notes

The plan is a sketch without any preliminary drawing and is similar in type, albeit much smaller in scale, to the plans in Adam vol.9/43 and 44, which show circular pavilions, perhaps inspired by the maritime theatre at Tivoli. The drawing in Adam vol.9/59 shows a similar type of composition and is drawn in the same style.

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).