[1] Design for the house, 1758-63, unexecuted

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Country houses
  - Fonthill Splendens, Tisbury, Wiltshire: unexecuted designs for the house, interior decoration, and a bridge for Alderman William Beckford, date range: 1758-70 (9)
    - Design for the house, 1758-63, unexecuted (1)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 50/30

Purpose

[1] Design for the house, 1758-63, unexecuted

Aspect

Part plan and elevation of a two-storey, three-bay central block, with a balustraded and pitched roof, and with a central one-bay loggia on the ground storey, flanked by curved external stairs providing access to a central door on the upper register, which is behind a portico of paired Ionic columns surmounted by a pediment, and this is flanked by Venetian windows within relieving arches. The central block is flanked by two-and-a-half-storey, three-bay, projecting, pedimented wings, with a central aedicular window on the first storey

Scale

1 1/2 inches to 10 feet

Inscribed

Design for Willm Beckford Esqr at Fonthill (in the hand of William Adam) / A The Landing of Stairs to be 6 Inches under Floor of Hall / A and measurements given

Signed and dated

1758-1763
Date range: 1758-63

Medium and dimensions

Pen and pencil on laid paper (597 x 489)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly Agostino Brunias or Laurent-Benoit Dewez, with title inscription in the hand of William Adam

Watermark

PVL

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 13
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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).