[12] Variant design for the principal front of a house, 1783, unexecuted

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Projects known only by patron
  - Earl of Findlater, designs for a town house for an unknown location, possibly Portland Place, London, c1783, unexecuted (17)
    - Preliminary design, designs and finished drawing for the west front of a house, c1783, unexecuted (4)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 36/37

Purpose

[12] Variant design for the principal front of a house, 1783, unexecuted

Aspect

Elevation of a two-and-a-half storey, five-bay building, with a part-sunken basement, and with the central three bays receding. There is a central, stepped entrance set within a circular, Tuscan portico with a frieze of rosettes, and this is flanked by balustraded windows. Above this there is an aedicule doorway, flanked by slit windows, set within a niche behind an Ionic screen and with a semi-circular, balustraded balcony, and this is flanked by further balustraded windows. In the upper register there are half-height windows. The pedimented first and fifth bays are projecting, with tripartite part-windows at the basement level. At the ground-storey level there are tripartite windows with Tuscan pilaster screens, set within relieving arches. Above this there are plain tablets, with aprons of guttae, and these are flanked by rosettes. At the first-storey level there are semi-circular-headed, balustraded aedicule windows, articulated by Ionic columns, and surmounted by oculi flanked by festoons, all set within relieving arches

Scale

bar scale of 1 1/4 inches to 10 feet

Inscribed

21 (red ink) and some dimensions given

Signed and dated

August 1783
Adelphi / 22.d August 1783

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and wash on laid paper (477 x 317)

Hand

Possibly
Office hand, possibly Robert Morison

Verso

no. 2

Watermark

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, pp. 103-4, Index, p. 45
Rowan, 1985, p. 138
King, 2001, Volume II, pp. 57, 102-6, 130
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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