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  • image SM Adam volume 31/37

Reference number

SM Adam volume 31/37

Purpose

[2] Finished drawing for the principal floor of the assembly rooms, c.1787, unexecuted

Aspect

Principal (first) floor plan comprising two large reception rooms with staircases and a lobby in the centre. The front reception room is a large ballroom with bars and chimneypieces at either end, and screens of columns to the front of the building and octagonal lobby area. The rear reception room is a circular tea room articulated by a series of engaged columns and freestanding pairs of columns, and flanked by two card rooms with central chimneypieces. The black and grey washes denote the existing structure (grey) and proposed alterations (black)

Scale

bar scale of 5/8 of an inch to 10 feet

Inscribed

Principal Story / Of a Design for altering the Assembly rooms at Edinburgh. / Card room / Tea Room / Card room / Principal Stairs / Lobby / Principal Stairs / Bar / for / [_ _ _ _ _] / Etc. / Back / Stairs / Back / Stairs / Bar / for / Tea / Coffee / Etc ~ / Ballroom with some room dimensions / (verso) 4 / Assy . R . Er / from Edinr 22? July [_ _ _ _]

Signed and dated

  • c.1787
    datable to c.1787

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and wash on laid paper within a ruled border (321x516)

Hand

possibly
Adam office hand, possibly Robert Morison or Daniel Robertson

Watermark

J WHATMAN

Literature

Bolton, 1922, p. 10
Further literary references in 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.

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