[10] Preliminary design for the principal elevation of a building, c.1791-94, executed

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Public buildings
  - Glasgow Assembly Rooms: designs, c.1791-94, executed in part (10)
    - Designs for the Glasgow Assembly Rooms, executed in part (2)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 1/66

Purpose

[10] Preliminary design for the principal elevation of a building, c.1791-94, executed

Aspect

Principal elevation of a two-storey, five-bay building with a rusticated ground floor and a raised parapet at roof level with bottle-neck balustrading. The central three-bays project forward and contain a ground-floor arcade and a first-floor Venetian window flanked by smaller windows set between paired Ionic columns supporting an entablature and pedestals decorated with festoons, surmounted by an enclosed bell motif flanked by reclining figures. The outer first-floor bays have tripartite windows in relieving arches next to paired Ionic pilasters at the ends of the building supporting pedestals surmounted by sphinx. There is a continuous frieze above the first floor containing the following inscriptions ‘TONTINE’, ‘ASSEMBLY’ and ‘TAVERN’

Scale

to a scale

Signed and dated

c.1791-94
datable to c.1791-94

Medium and dimensions

Pencil on laid paper (311x232)

Hand

Probably
Robert or James Adam

Watermark

GR surmounted by a fleur de lis within a crowned cartouche

Notes

The sphinxes and proposed inscriptions ‘TONTINE’, ‘ASSEMBLY’ and ‘TAVERN’ were omitted from the published design in Richardson’s New Vitruvius Britannicus and the executed building.

Literature

Bolton, 1922, p. 14
Richardson, 1802, Pl. 9
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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