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  • image SM Adam volume 43/87

Reference number

SM Adam volume 43/87

Purpose

[9] Design showing the principal front of the house, c1761

Aspect

Elevation of a three-storey, seven-bay central block, with a hipped roof, the end bays recessed and containing sculpture-filled niches on the first storey, with a rusticated ground storey, and the central five bays have aedicular windows on the first storey. The central three bays are projecting on the ground storey, and contain a window and a central door within relieving arches, and are surmounted by a portico of fluted Spalatro columns, and a pediment supporting three acroteria and figurative sculpture, and with a coat of arms in the tympanum. The central three bays have a frieze of arabesques, and the outer bays have a frieze of bows, festoons, and rosettes. The central block is flanked by two-storey, balustraded bows on the side fronts, with a rusticated ground storey, and aedicular windows in the upper register

Scale

bar scale of 1 3/4 inches to 10 feet

Inscribed

Elevation of a House in Town for the Right Honble The Earl of Shelburne Fronting Piccadilly and the / Green Park and some measurements given

Signed and dated

  • 1761
    datable to c1761

Medium and dimensions

Pen and pencil on laid paper (594 x 514)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly Robert Adam or Agostino Brunias

Watermark

XD&CB within a cartouche

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 45
King, 2001, Volume II, p. 130
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

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.

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).