
Browse
- Robert and James Adam office drawings
Reference number
Purpose
Aspect
Second drawing room – Elevation of a frieze ornamented with arabesques and tubular flowers, which support a platform, bearing a socle and wreath, and an apron with a rosette and festoons. This is flanked by heraldic stags (the Bathurst armorial supporters), with swags set behind. All this alternates with calyx and arabesques, which are surmounted by husks and a tubular flower bearing an anthemion, flanked by winged sphinxes
Lady’s dressing room – Elevation of a frieze ornamented with cameos depicting urns, alternating with cameos depicting winged putti, each enclosed within an oval band of beading. These are separated by longitudinal bands of rosettes and calyx
Bedchamber – Elevation of a frieze ornamented with interlacing circles of beading. These alternately enclose rosettes, arabesques and fans, rosettes, calyx and arabesques. The overlaps enclose paterae, and are flanked by calyx
Scale
Inscribed
Signed and dated
- ND
no date
Medium and dimensions
Hand
James Adam
Watermark
Literature
King, 2001, 282
Bradley and Pevsner, 2003, pp. 486-487
Lea, 2005, pp.10, 14-15
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.
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).