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  • image SM Adam volume 33/30

Reference number

SM Adam volume 33/30

Purpose

[33] Finished drawing for the section of a group of prison buildings for Edinburgh Bridewell, 1791, executed in part

Aspect

Axial section from north to south showing a group of prison buildings. At the north end is a two-storey lodge with a pitched roof, connected to the governor’s house by a single-storey wall. The governor’s house is three storeys over a basement with a curved perron staircase to the front. The house connects directly with the main prison building, comprising a stairwell, curved inspection tower with windows looking onto the cells, pews for the chapel, and a series of individual arched cell openings with rooms beyond. To the north of this building is a single-storey inspection lodge with a wall bounding one of the yards

Scale

bar scale of 3/8 of an inch to 10 feet

Inscribed

Section from South to North, through the Lodge at the Gate, the Governours[sic] house, the Inspection room, the Chapel & part of the working / cells & passage between them and the sleeping cells, The inspection lodge to the yards & the sunk passage leading to them. / (verso) with small fronts / [_]tions finish

Signed and dated

  • 1791
    Robt Adam Architect 1791.

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, wash and coloured wash including lemon yellow and pink on laid paper within a ruled border (445x456)

Hand

Possibly
Adam office hand, possibly Robert Morison, John Robertson, or John Paterson

Watermark

GR surmounted by a fleur de lis within a crowned cartouche

Literature

Bolton, 1922, p. 11
King, Vol. 1, 2001, pp. 56-7
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.

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