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  • image SM Adam volume 10/195

Reference number

SM Adam volume 10/195

Purpose

[6] Preliminary design for the east front of a house, c1784, unexecuted

Aspect

Elevation of a three-storey, seven-bay building, with a hipped roof, a part-sunken basement, and a sloping ground level from south to north. The central three bays are slightly projecting, and are surmounted by a broken pediment. There is a central balustraded screen, with a frieze of fluting and roundels, all set within a relieving arch. This is flanked by niches and figurative roundels, and is surmounted by an oculus, flanked by swags and festoons. To the north there is a raised Ionic screen. To the south a pedimented Ionic portico

Scale

bar scale of 1 inch to 10 feet

Signed and dated

  • c1784
    c1784

Medium and dimensions

Pencil on laid paper (235 x 201)

Hand

Probably
Robert Adam

Watermark

Banded cartouche surmounted by fleur-de-lis

Literature

Rowan, 1985, p. 38
King, 2001, Volume I, p. 122
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

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).