[2] Design for a bridge, c.1791, executed to a variant design

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Country houses
  - Dalkeith House, Midlothian: executed designs for a bridge and porter’s lodge with gates, and an unexecuted design for a sundial, for Henry Scott, 3rd Duke of Buccleuch, c.1791-94 (8)
    - Designs for a bridge, c.1791-92, executed to a variant design (5)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 34/110

Purpose

[2] Design for a bridge, c.1791, executed to a variant design

Aspect

Fliers closed: Elevation of a bridge comprising a semi-circular-headed arch flanked by two piers, one containing a niche with an urn, and a panel with strigillation above, the other left plain. The bridge is rusticated and decorated with a continuous frieze and dentilled cornice below the parapet. There is a pencil outline of a stag at the centre of the parapet and a repetition of the design of the right pier adjoining the right pier Fliers open: Same as above but with urns in pedimented niches with Greek Doric columns and with arabesque panels above, on both piers. There are two reclining figures depicted above the piers in pencil

Scale

bar scale of 1 inch to 10 feet

Inscribed

Design of a Doric Bridge of 70 feet span over which it is intended to pass in the new Approach from Edinb to Dalkeith House / The hight from the level of the Water above the 4 feet fall to the Crown of the Arch to be 42 feet ~ / (and in the hand of William Adam) for his Grace the Duke of Buccleugh at Dalkeith / (and in another hand) Albemarle Street

Signed and dated

c.1791
datable to c.1791

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and wash within a pencil-ruled border on laid paper (558x384)

Hand

Possibly
Adam office hand, possibly Robert Morison or John Robertson

Watermark

J Whatman / W surmounted by fleur de lis in crowned cartouche

Literature

Bolton, Volume II, Index, 1922, p. 9
King, Volume 1, 2001, pp. 334-335
King, Volume 2, 2001, p. 214
Further literary references in 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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