Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  [5] Preliminary design for a detail of the New Town looking towards the river, 1781

Browse

  • image SM Adam volume 10/79

Reference number

SM Adam volume 10/79

Purpose

[5] Preliminary design for a detail of the New Town looking towards the river, 1781

Aspect

Elevation of a detail of the New Town, with a central one-and-a-half-storey, single-bay arched gateway, accessed by tapering stairs, flanked by paired Doric columns, and surmounted by sculpted trophies. This gateway is flanked by single-storey, two-bay balustraded links, containing either thermal or oculus windows within relieving arches. Beyond are one-and-a-half-storey, single-bay pavilions, with an oculus window within a relieving arch on the ground storey, surmounted by a thermal window in the upper register, and with a pyramidal roof; and then there are further single-bay links taking the same form, with oculus windows within relieving arches

Scale

bar scale of 1 2/5 inches to 10 feet

Inscribed

2 Coaches / Highest flood . Common level and some measurements given

Signed and dated

  • 24/12/1781
    24t. Decr. 1781

Medium and dimensions

Pencil on laid paper (619 x 250)

Hand

Robert Adam

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 3
King, 2001, Volume 2, p. 76
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).