[11] Finished drawing for the west end of the quadrangle, 1784, unexecuted

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Public buildings
  - King's College, Cambridge, designs for a chapel altar, new college buildings and a library, 1768-88, unexecuted (28)
    - Preliminary designs, designs and finished drawings for the south front of the quadrangle, c1784, unexecuted (12)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 31/4

Purpose

[11] Finished drawing for the west end of the quadrangle, 1784, unexecuted

Aspect

Elevation of a two-and-a-half storey, seven-bay building with rustication at the ground-storey level and a balustraded, pitched roof with a stepped dome beyond. The dome contains an oculus and the drum is ornamented with a frieze of swags and rosettes. At the ground-storey level there is a central, stepped, semi-circular-headed entrance set within a single-storey, single-bay Tuscan portico. The entrance is flanked by three-quarter-height windows. At the first-storey level there are balustraded aedicula windows articulated by Ionic pilasters and there is a string course of guilloche above. In the upper register there are quarter-height windows with a frieze of winged griffin enclosed within semi-circular-headed bands of beading. The building terminates in two-and-a-half-storey, single-bay pavilions, with rustication and three-quarter-height windows at the ground-storey level. At the first-storey level there are balustraded windows, set behind colonnaded screens and within relieving arches. The screens have friezes of swags and rosettes and the heads of the arches contain oculi flanked by festoons. The windows are flanked by giant Corinthian pilasters with friezes of fluting and capitals containing rosettes above

Scale

bar scale of 1 3/8 inches tp 10 feet

Inscribed

Elevation of the West end of the Quadrangle (underwritten in pencil) / of Kings College Cambridge (in the hand of William Adam, underwritten in pencil) / No. 5 (pencil)

Signed and dated

1784
Robt Adam Architect 1784.

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and wash within a double ruled border on laid paper (745 x 538)

Hand

Probably
Robert Adam, with part title inscription in the hand of William Adam

Verso

Cambridge University / 4 / 4

Watermark

PVL

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, pp. 173-79; Index, p. 6
King, 2001, Volume II, p. 53
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).