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  • image Adam vol.9/64

Reference number

Adam vol.9/64

Purpose

Academic study for the plan of a large, probably symmetrical, building with a central hall of Greek Cross form, with octagonal halls on either side, leading to large double-porticoes of eight bays on steps and two other porticoes.

Aspect

Plan

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 64

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 -56

Medium and dimensions

Black chalk181 x 201

Hand

Robert Adam

Watermark

pot [?]

Notes

The plan may be compared with a similar but smaller and more finished scheme in Adam vol.9/21. In the portico arrangement and symmetrical arrangement of the halls, it may also be related to both Robert and James Adam's later schemes for a Parliament building (see A. A. Tait, Robert Adam: drawings and imagination, Cambridge, 1993, pp.55-9).

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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