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Designs for the west, north and south fronts of the house, 1789, possibly executed (5)

Notes

The alternative designs for the principal (west) front are the earliest in this scheme. SM Adam volume 29/60 appears to have been the favoured design, with a number of ornamental elements reproduced in the design for the north front (SM Adam volume 29/63), produced a month later.

It is not known if Adam’s scheme for Ruscombe was executed, as the house was demolished in the 1830s. Near contemporary accounts refer to an extensive rebuild undertaken by Sir James Eyre, and King highlights the fact that the dates of the scheme extend over a six-month period, suggesting them to be of some significance.

In October 2008 a late eighteenth-century English lead ornamental composition comparable to that designed for the roof line of the south façade, was auctioned at Sotheby’s, New York. This suggests Adam’s scheme was at least part-executed. See scheme notes.

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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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Contents of Designs for the west, north and south fronts of the house, 1789, possibly executed (5)