Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  [3] Finished drawing showing an elevation of the principal front for the building. C1765-68, unexecuted
  • image SM Adam volume 28/45
Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image
Print this image in A4 view  (icon indicating printer link)

Reference number

SM Adam volume 28/45

Purpose

[3] Finished drawing showing an elevation of the principal front for the building. C1765-68, unexecuted

Aspect

Elevation of the principal front of a two-storey building, with a central eleven-bay concave colonnade of fluted Corinthian columns, behind which is a central arched entrance, screened by two Ionic columns, and surmounted by a thermal window, and flanked by four pedimented doors, alternating with sculpture-filled niches, above which are relief panels and square windows, and this central colonnade is flanked by three-bay pedimented projecting wings, with rectangular sculpture-filled recesses on the ground storey, supported by consoled, articulated engaged Ionic columns, and surmounted by segmental pediments, above which is a rectangular relief panel, and three square windows, and beyond these wings are single-storey, single-bay domed bows, projecting from the sides of the building

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

Design for a Ball and Court Room at Bath (in the hand of William Adam)

Signed and dated

  • 1765-68
    date range: 1765-68 (see scheme notes)

Medium and dimensions

Pen and wash within a double ruled border on laid paper (1759 x 572)

Hand

Adam office hand, with title inscription in the hand of William Adam. For the finished drawings made for the Adam brothers’ unexecuted Bath Assembly Rooms scheme, it is difficult to assign a specific draughtsman’s hand as the date is not exact; they are drawn in the Adam office in-house style, and the author could be any one of around seven or eight draughtsmen including Robert Nasmith, Giuseppe Sacco, William Hamilton, J.P. Laurent or Joseph Bonomi.

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 3
King, 2001, Volume II, p. 53
Rowan, 2003, p. 27
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

'Bob the Roman': Heroic Antiquity and the Architecture of Robert Adam, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 27 June - 27 September 2003; New York School of Interior Design Gallery, 29 September - 4 December 2004

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).