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  • image Adam vol.7/8
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Reference number

Adam vol.7/8

Purpose

London: Parliament House (designs for). Unfinished design showing proposed and incomplete floor plan for the central hall with the royal arms in the centre and various other royal symbols in a series of radials. Above on the sheet are two details of a rectangular and a semi-circular pattern.

Aspect

Details verso details

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink in a contemporary hand Equally / divided / 3 ft / bla / 3 ft / white / 2 ft / 1 1/2 / 2 ft / here a border of black 2 ft. wide / a border of black / 3 steps white / black border Lettered in floor pattern VI.MAL.Y verso inscribed in pencil leaving for / Dreghorn

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1763

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, grey, blue, yellow, brown and pink washes 427 x 272

Hand

James Adam (attributed to)

Verso

Small details in pencil of rosettes and panels.

Notes

There is a less complete version of the circular plan here in Adam vol.7/11. This drawing is part of a group of drawings of various floor patterns for James Adam's Parliament House scheme, see Adam vol.7/5-7, 9-12, 72 and 74-76. The detail of this aspect of the scheme would suggest that these drawings were executed in the 1763 period. The hall shown here is identified in the plan in Adam vol.7/2 of 1760 as a 'Court of Tryals' . The notes are written in a small neat hand, probably that of James Adam, and the drawing may well be his too. However, the note on the verso 'Dreghorn' could refer to a Scottish draughtsman or to the eighteenth-century building near Edinburgh.
The lettering on the floor is part of the motto of the Order of the Garter: 'Honi soit qui mal y pense'.

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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