[144] Engraving of the principal front, 1771-72, as executed

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Town houses
  - London
    - The Adelphi, London: designs for a speculative complex built by William Adam & Co., 1768-84 (168)
      - John Street
        Royal Society of Arts, numbers 18 and 19 (later 8 and 6) John Street
        Preliminary design, design, finished drawings and an engraving showing plans and elevations for the building, 1771-72, as executed (5)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 32/12

Purpose

[144] Engraving of the principal front, 1771-72, as executed

Aspect

Elevation of a three-storey, three-bay building, with a flat roof, and with a central door surmounted by a fanlight, within a lotus capital porch, and flanked by slit windows, surmounted by a Venetian window within a relieving arch ornamented with a fan on the first storey, flanked by balconied windows, and with the bays articulated by fluted Ionic columns on the first and second storeys, supporting a Doric frieze with rosettes, and a tablet reading ARTS AND COMMERCE PROMOTED, surmounted by a pediment with an oculus in the tympanum, and with three sculpture-filled acroteria, and with a string course of guilloche between the first and second storeys, surmounted by half-height windows

Scale

bar scale of 1/3 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Elevation of the House of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce, situated on John Street Adelphi. / Elevation de la Maison Société pour l’Encouragement des Arts, des Manufactures, et du Commerce, situeé dans la Rue de Jean, aux Adelphi. / Plate IV / No. 2 (in pencil) (verso) 1 / 1

Signed and dated

1771-72
datable to 1771-72

Medium and dimensions

Engraving (435 x 580)

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 34
Rowan, 1974, p. 675
Rowan, 2007, p. 60
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Vaulting Ambition: The Adam Brothers, Contractors to the Metropolis in the Reign of George III, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 14 September 2007 - 12 January 2008; The Wilson Art Gallery and Museum, Cheltenham, 19 April - 24 May 2008; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, 24 October - 13 December 2008

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).