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Purpose
Signed and dated
- c1764
Notes
There are five drawings for alterations to Buchanan Castle, and as these drawings survive in the Adam drawings collection at Sir John Soane's Museum the involvement of Robert and/or James, as well as John Adam, with the works for the 2nd Duke at Buchanan House is possible. Therefore it is likely that the London and Edinburgh Adam offices were working in collaboration during John's employment there, at any date between Robert's return from Italy in 1758, and 1789, when alterations were commissioned from James Playfair. It is worthy of note that King has suggested a possible date of 1764 for these unexecuted designs, but there is no firm evidence for this.
Later, in 1789, the 3rd Duke commissioned James Playfair (1755-94) to make further alterations, but the Georgian house was destroyed by fire in 1850. A new house was built by the 4th Duke in 1854-58 to designs by William Burn (1789-1870), only for this house also to suffer a fire in 1954. The interior was gutted and the house remains a ruin. The estate was sold in 1925, and what survives of the service wing is now occupied by a golf club.
Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index pp. 5, 81; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume II, p. 123; J. Gifford, and F.A. Walker, The buildings of Scotland: Stirling and Central Scotland, 2002, p. 290
Frances Sands, 2012
Level
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).