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Purpose

Westminster Abbey, London: Monument to Major-General James Wolfe, public commission, 1759, unexecuted (11)

Signed and dated

  • 1759

Notes

Major-General James Wolfe (1727-59) was the elder son of Lieutenant-General Edward Wolfe (1685-59). In February 1759 he sailed from Spithead to command the British forces in Canada. He died in battle from three gun-shot wounds five days before the surrender of Quebec (18 September 1759), and was hailed a national hero who had given his life for a triumphant victory. As such, an official commission for a monument in Westminster Abbey was made, for which Robert Adam, William Chambers (1722-96), and the sculptor Joseph Wilton (1722-1803) all submitted designs. This was Adam's first design for a funerary monument - no doubt lured by the fame that a public commission of this sort would give him - and among the extant drawings there are six variant designs. Each makes use of a relief panel showing Wolfe's death. Neither Adam's nor Chambers' designs for the Wolfe monument were accepted, the commission being awarded instead to Wilton.

There are six monuments in Westminster Abbey designed by Robert Adam: to the Duchess of Northumberland, Roger Townshend, John André, James Thomson, Mary Hope and William Dalrymple.

Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 51; J. Lees-Milne, The age of Adam, 1947, p. 26; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume II, pp. 261-3

Frances Sands, 2011

Level

Scheme

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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Contents of Westminster Abbey, London: Monument to Major-General James Wolfe, public commission, 1759, unexecuted (11)