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  • image Adam vol.9/65

Reference number

Adam vol.9/65

Purpose

Unfinished academic study for part of a plan for a hall with two screened apses with colonnades of columns and piers, and a large staircase of three flights. Towards the top right is an overdrawing of a figure.

Aspect

Plan

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 65verso inscribed in ink in a contemporary hand, probably that of Robert Adam September /Ld Hopetoun / Mr. Ramsay's recovering/ di Castelli Bolognese/ & send him is Accot./ ready for Sora to write the/ d[be] longe with it/ Stanhope about his Ladden

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56

Medium and dimensions

Pen, chalk, grey wash121 x 191

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

The references in this inscription to 'September' and 'Soro' would suggest a letter written by Robert Adam before his and Charles-Louis Clérisseau's tour to Soro in June 1756. Also around this time the Earl of Hopetoun, Sir William Stanhope and Allan Ramsay were all involved in Adam's scheme for rebuilding Lisbon, Portugal (see Adam vol.9/56, and J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, p.205). Castelli Bolognese was an unremarkable town between Faenza and Imola, which Adam may have seen on his Ravenna tour of September 1755.

Notes

The plan is similar to that for part of a quadrant in Adama vol.9/63 and it may be part of the circular scheme seen best in Adam vol.9/52. The overdrawn chalk figure indicates that the sheet has been re-used, similarly found in Adam vol.9/67, as does the fragment of inscription on the verso.

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.

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