Preliminary design for a monument, February 1774, unexecuted (1)

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Monuments and mausolea
  - Unknown location: Monument to Mrs Margaret Calderwood, probably commissioned by Lieutenant-Colonel William Calderwood, 1774, unexecuted (1)

Purpose

Preliminary design for a monument, February 1774, unexecuted (1)

Notes

Mrs Calderwood of Polton, Fifeshire, died on 18 February 1774. The intended location for this monument is unknown as it was not executed, but it is assumed that she was buried in the area of Polton, near Edinburgh, the estate belonging to her husband Thomas, and then her son William.

This design was reused in 1992 to commemorate Robert Adam himself. It is appropriate for this usage as it makes use of no personal motifs, only torches and an urn: both being symbolic of death.

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Group

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).

Contents of Preliminary design for a monument, February 1774, unexecuted (1)

[1] Preliminary design for a monument, February 1774, unexecuted