[2] Design for a triumphal arch, gatehouses and screens, 1778, unexecuted

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
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  - Hyde Park Corner, London, designs for a triumphal arch, gatehouses and screens, c1778, unexecuted (18)
    - Preliminary designs, design and finished drawing for a triumphal arch, first design, c1778, unexecuted (6)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 28/9

Purpose

[2] Design for a triumphal arch, gatehouses and screens, 1778, unexecuted

Aspect

Plan of a triumphal archway, with a central gateway flanked by niches with engaged half-columns, and with a weigh house to the north, and a gatekeepers house to the south. The arch terminates in gateways for foot traffic, screened with engaged half-columns. To the east of the arch there is a pair of colonnaded screens, which terminate in gatehouses and contain central gateways with driveways beyond. To the north-west a drive leads to Kensington Palace, and to the south-east a new road is proposed, which forms a formal drive for Queen’s House and St James’s Palace. To the south-west a garden for the gate keeper is proposed, abutting the garden to the Queen’s House. To the north-east there is a footprint of Lord Bathurst’s Apsley House and coach house

Scale

bar scale of 1 inch to 20 feet

Inscribed

Part of Hyde Park / Road from Kensington palace / Road from Grosvenor Gate / Earl Bathursts House / Coach house Earl Bathursts House- / Footway / footway / Weigh House / Road to Kensington / Gateway / Toll Gatekeepers House / footway / Hyde Park Corner / Piccadilly / Part of St Georges Hospital / New Road proposed to the Queens House & St James's Palace- / Present Gate & Road from Piccadilly to the Queens House / Present Lodge for the Keepers / Road to the Rangers Lodge / Chelsea & Ranelagh Road / Part of the Green Park / New Garden for the Keeper / Part of the Garden to the Queens House

Signed and dated

November 1778
Adelphi / Nov.r 1778

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, wash and olive green wash within a single ruled border on laid paper (569 x 766)

Hand

Possibly
Office hand, possibly Joseph Bonomi or Robert Morison

Verso

Hyde Park Gateway / (brown ink) November 3

Watermark

PVL

Notes

This plan for Adam’s proposed monumental arch at the termination of the Great West Road opening on to Piccadilly, significantly records existing features of the surrounding area c1778. To the north-east of the arch the footprint of Adam’s Apsley house is shown, complete with its coach house. While a number of drawings from the Adam office’s Apsley scheme survive, none relate to the coach house in this composition as a separate structure. The arch’s paired entrance screens provide access to the royal parks, with a proposed new road leading south through Green Park to Queen’s House (Buckingham House). Further east the plan records an existing route to the royal residence. To the west of the arch, on the Chelsea and Ranleigh road, part of the footprint of the first St George’s Hospital is shown.

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index, p. 41
Rowan, 1988, p. 56, pl. 28
King, 2001, Volume II, p. 57
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

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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.

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