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He died in 1778 and a monument was commissioned by John Hope (1725-1786) to be built in Edinburgh. Hope was a Scottish physician, botanist and professor who was an acquaintance and supporter of Linnaeus and his work. Adam was appointed to design the monument and created two variants comprising an urn on a square pedestal. The executed design (SM Adam volume 19/60) contains an inscription by John Hope.
The monument has remained in the Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, though it has been relocated several times within the gardens and now resides outside Temperate House.
Literature: A.T. Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, Volume II, Index, 1922, p.11; D. King, The Complete Works of Robert & James Adam and Unbuilt Adam, Volume 1, 2001, pp. 363, 369; D. King, Volume 2, 2001, p. 265; J. Gifford (et. al.), Buildings of Scotland: Edinburgh, 1984, p.575; G. Douglas, ‘Carl Linnaeus [later Carl von Linné] 1707-1778’ in Oxford Dictionary of Biography (online), 2007; I. Charmantier, 'Linnaeus and Race', The Linnean Society of London, online, 2020 [accessed 15 March 2024]
Louisa Catt, 2024
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).
Contents of Linnaeus Monument, Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh: designs for a monument to Carl Linnaeus (also known as Carl von Linné), 1778, executed (2)
- [1] Design for a monument, 1778, executed to a variant design
- [2] Design for a monument, 1778, as executed