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  • image Adam vol.7/3
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Reference number

Adam vol.7/3

Purpose

London: Parliament House (designs for). Plan showing two double seven-bay porticoes with steps opening into a circular hall with on either side two larger circular courts, each with a central fountain and a small portico at the end.

Aspect

Plan verso plan [part]

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink in a contemporary hand River and Geo. 3d, Late King to river-side statue plinths, and Illustrous peers / Illustrous commons / 200 [dia. of central rotunda] / chancellors / 70 / speakers / 70 [dias. of their dooms]

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1760

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil 202 x 294, folded twice vertically

Hand

James Adam

Verso

Drawing in pencil of part of a plan for a portico.

Watermark

dove on monti

Notes

This plan follows from that in Adam vol.7/2, with the introduction of two large circular courts for 'Illustrous' peers and commons, adjoining James Adam's proposed new chambers for each. The lateral porticoes in Adam vol.7/2 have been scaled down and theother two increased in importance. This drawing and the related elevation in Adam vol.7/4 probably belong to late 1760, that is if they were drawn in Italy. The inscribed notes 'Geo. 3d' and 'Late King' establish the date of the drawing after October 1760, George III's accession.

Literature

Repr. A. A. Tait, Robert Adam: drawings and imagination, Cambridge, 1993, p.64, fig.53; D. Stillman, English Neo-classical Architecture, 2 vols., London, 1988, vol.1, p.57, fig.9

Level

Drawing

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

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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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