Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Robert and James Adam travel drawings

Purpose

Robert and James Adam travel drawings

Notes

The 9,000 drawings in 57 albums entered Soane's collection in 1833.
These first catalogue entries deal with the Grand Tours of Robert and then James Adam. The drawings are undated but range from c. 1744 to c. 1768. They have been catalogued by Professor Alan Tait.
We are grateful for the assistance of Dr Amanda Claridge on matters archaeological, and to Michael Snodin and Shaun Cole of the Victoria and Albert Museum for help with engraved ornament.
This catalogue has been made possible by the generous financial support of Mrs Gisela Gledhill, in memory of her late husband, Richard Harris, with additional financial asssistance from the Furthermore Foundation and the Dunard Trust.

Level

Architect

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).  


Contents of Robert and James Adam travel drawings