Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  [3] Design for the ground floor of a building, c.1789, unexecuted

Browse

  • image SM Adam volume 1/191
Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image
Print this image in A4 view  (icon indicating printer link)

Reference number

SM Adam volume 1/191

Purpose

[3] Design for the ground floor of a building, c.1789, unexecuted

Aspect

Ground plan of a house with projecting corner turrets and a central rear bow forming an internal circular room, followed by a pair of oval staircases with a grand staircase opposite, flanked by a series of small rooms including a cellar, confectionary and servant’s hall

Scale

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

Inscribed

for the Earl of Findlater / (underwritten in pencil) Ho. Keeper / over / Maid Servant / Cellar / Confectionary / Servants Hall / [_ _ _]llerable / (in pencil) Stairs

Signed and dated

  • c.1789
    datable to c.1789

Medium and dimensions

Pen and pencil on laid paper (181x226)

Hand

Possibly
Adam office hand, possibly Robert Morison or Daniel Robertson

Watermark

C Taylor

Notes

The grand staircase appears to have been directly lifted from Adam’s designs for Culzean Castle. The drawing aligns closely with another principal floor plan of the proposed Findlater Castle (SM Adam volume 36/33), however, its inscriptions include rooms that are more closely aligned with the basement.

Literature

King, 2001, p. 162
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.

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).