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- Robert and James Adam office drawings
Purpose
Notes
During a discussion of this drawing Snodin suggested that the straight-sided top appears like a stone cinerary urn, though these do not usually have legs. The ancient model is therefore stone, and the massiveness of this design suggests the use of stone or carved wood. The high relief figures would be difficult to carry out in metal, except with cast and applied elements, as in Stuart's plate warmer. However, the handle on the top is small, suggesting the use of metal, but perhaps this is an early design, made with little thought for material.
Level
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).