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Purpose
Signed and dated
- 1776
Notes
During Adam's tenure he was responsible for remodelling the Paymaster General and Commissioner's house at number 1 Whitehall in 1771, and for redecorating the Council Chamber at the hospital in 1776. No drawings for these projects survive, and 1 Whitehall was demolished in 1909. Further to this, Adam undertook redecoration in the Governor's house, located at the south end of the west wing of Chelsea Hospital, and two of Adam’s chimneypiece drawings for this building survive at the Soane Museum.
Chelsea Hospital has been publically funded since 1847, and remains the home of around 300 retired soldiers.
See also: The drawings of John Soane/Public buildings/London: Royal Hospital, Chelsea for the Board of Commissioners, 1807-1835
Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 36; Survey of London, Volume II: Chelsea, Part IV, 1927, pp. 21-22; C.G.T. Dean, The Royal Hospital Chelsea, 1950, pp. 65-67; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume I, p. 43; M. Burn, The drawings of John Soane/Public buildings/London: Royal Hospital Chelsea for the Board of Commissioners, 1807-1835 (226); Sir John Soane's Museum online drawings catalogue
Frances Sands, 2013
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).