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  • image SM Adam volume 33/84
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Reference number

SM Adam volume 33/84

Purpose

[4] Design for a house showing the principal front, 1789, unexecuted

Aspect

Elevation of the principal front of a house, with a two-storey, three-bay central block with a hipped roof. There is a central bow on the ground floor, containing a door flanked by windows, and articulated by lotus-capital engaged columns, and the bow is surmounted by a balustraded balcony. The bow is flanked by tripartite pedimented windows on slightly projecting end bays. The first storey contains a central pedimented door onto the balcony, flanked by tripartite windows. The central block is flanked by single-storey, single-bay links containing arched doors, and with small portions of balustrading in the roofline, and beyond are single-storey, single-bay pavilions with pitched roofs, and each containing a tripartite pedimented window. There are two small fliers attached to the sheet: one showing the house without a bow and only a pedimented front door, and the other showing the links without any balustrading along the roofline. There are also pencil annotations showing a basic colonnade to the left-hand side of the sheet, and a chimney stack on the left-hand pavilion

Scale

bar scale of ¾ inch to 10 feet

Inscribed

Elevation of a House for Thomas White Esqr. (verso) house for Thomas White Esqr / 1 Elevation, 1 Section, 4 Ground Plans / from No 12

Signed and dated

  • 05/06/1789
    Albermarle Street / 5t. June 1789

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and wash on laid paper (472 x 295)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly Robert Morison or Daniel Robertson

Watermark

GR surmounted by fleur de lis within crowned cartouche

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 58
King, 2001, Volume II, p. 136
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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).