Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  [50] Design for the gallery, c1761-63, executed with alterations

Browse

  • image SM Adam volume 39/2

Reference number

SM Adam volume 39/2

Purpose

[50] Design for the gallery, c1761-63, executed with alterations

Aspect

Elevations of the chimney and window walls of a gallery. The window wall is eleven bays in length, with bookcases flanked by Corinthian pilasters on each pier, and the wall is ornamented with rectangular panels and a frieze of festoons, and there are pencil-drawn cabinets against some of the piers. The chimney wall has three pedimented doors and two chimneypieces with fluted pilaster stiles and fluted friezes, with tripartite bookcases articulated by Corinthian pilasters in between, and the wall is ornamented with tripod and urn-filled rectangular and arched recesses, festoons, rectangular and lunette figurative panels, medallions, and a frieze of fret

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

Design for Sion Gallery Duke of Northumberland (in the hand of William Adam) (verso) Sion Gallery / 3 (in pencil) / another design (in pencil)

Signed and dated

  • 1761-63
    datable to c1761-63

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, wash and coloured washes including yellow ochre on laid paper (1508 x 484)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly Robert Adam or George Richardson, with title inscription in the hand of William Adam

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 28
Stillman, 1966, p. 6
Rowan, 1988, p. 85
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Original Drawings of Robert and James Adam, Kenwood House, London, 1953

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).