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  • image Adam vol.7/16
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Reference number

Adam vol.7/16

Purpose

Design showing the entrance elevation of a small two-storey house, with three bays and a pedimented doorway, with single-bay pavilions each side linked by three-bay arcading; it is set in a landscape with trees. Above are two plans showing a central staircase.

Aspect

Plans and elevation

Inscribed

verso Inscribed in ink in a contemporary hand Cardinal Richelieu / Commonwealth / The Fort George Ravelin / umpire / 1749 / Alex Postle.

Signed and dated

  • 1752

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen 187 x 205

Hand

James Adam

Verso

The series of large and small notes appear to have been some form of calligraphic exercise. Alex Postle may be a draughtsman in the Adam Scottish Office. There are also partial sketches of a gate pier and arch.

Notes

This type of small Palladian villa is characteristic of the work of both Robert and James Adam in the early 1750s; there remain several similar designs in the Blair Adam Collection of 1752 (see BA.209-214, and J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, pl.32). In his unfinished essay on architectural theory written in Rome in 1762 James Adam wrote that 'The villa allows but of one [storey] and its attic, which is of great utility as giving lodging or bedrooms' (Fleming, op.cit., p.317).
This sheet has clearly been re-used from the Adam office scheme for Fort George, near Inverness, Scotland of 1748-58 (see Fleming, op.cit., pp.84-86).

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.

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).