Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  London: Parliament House (designs for). Unfinished design showing what are possibly wall panels decorated with rosettes and incorporating royal symbols of a harp, winged unicorn and lion, around a rectangular window.
  • image Adam vol.7/12
Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image
Print this image in A4 view  (icon indicating printer link)

Reference number

Adam vol.7/12

Purpose

London: Parliament House (designs for). Unfinished design showing what are possibly wall panels decorated with rosettes and incorporating royal symbols of a harp, winged unicorn and lion, around a rectangular window.

Aspect

Elevation

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink in a contemporary hand Fenestra

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1762-63

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil 280 x 549, folded with one vertical fold line

Hand

James Adam, Office of

Watermark

Villandry

Notes

Although the note 'fenestra' would indicate that this is a design for a wall rather than a floor pattern, the iconographical programme seems to be the same as the group of drawings of various floor patterns for James Adam's Parliament House scheme, see Adam vol.7/5-11, 72 and 74-76. The detail of this aspect of the scheme would suggest that these drawings were executed in the 1763 period. The composition and hand may be compared with Adam vol.7/72, and both may be based on the Salle des Sibille in the Vatican in Rome by Pinturrichio (1452-1513).

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).