[3] Preliminary design for a castle-style building, c.1791, unexecuted

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Country houses
  - Castle Semple, Renfrewshire: designs for additions to an existing castle for William McDowall of Garthland, c.1791, unexecuted (4)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 1/186

Purpose

[3] Preliminary design for a castle-style building, c.1791, unexecuted

Aspect

Elevation of a three-storey, thirteen-bay building over a half-sunk basement with a central rotunda with a conical roof, and corner towers with turrets with pepper-pot roofs. The entire elevation is adorned in a mixture of arched windows within relieving arches, square-headed windows, and tripartite windows, some with hood mouldings, as well as balustrading, string coursing and machicolated cornices

Scale

to a rough scale of 5/8 of an inch to 10 feet

Inscribed

Skech[sic] for the Front of Castle Semple for William McDowall of Girthland[sic] Esqr / N. B. Skech of the Front for the Offices / [_ _] the other side of this paper / (verso) William McDonald ^Esquire of Garthland[sic] for Castle Semple Offices

Signed and dated

c.1791
datable to c.1791

Medium and dimensions

Pencil on laid paper (364x207)

Hand

Probably
Robert Adam

Verso

Pencil sketch of a castellated tower over a central gateway with an adjoining screen wall terminating in a single-storey circular tower

Watermark

Literature

Bolton, 1922, p. 6
King, 2001, p. 161
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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