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  • image Adam vol.7/63
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Reference number

Adam vol.7/63

Purpose

London: Parliament House (designs for). Design for a long rectangular panel showing a battle scene with soldiers landing from boats and advancing into battle. In the background is a walled town to one side and a naval battle. In the foreground are dead and wounded soldiers.

Aspect

Elevation

Inscribed

Inscribed primo in pencil and in a later hand for the Circular Hall; and in ink in a contemporary hand Town in War and Circular Hall

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1762-63

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, brown wash with white heightening, partly oxidised, on brown washed paper 163 x 778 with two vertical fold lines

Hand

Antonio Zucchi (attributed to)

Notes

This composition is part of a series of designs for James Adam's Parliament House scheme of 1762/63 that depict scenes and aspects of general life (Adam vol.7/60-67). Several are noted as being for either the Great or Circular Hall (as here) of the scheme; the plan in Adam vol.7/3 depicts three large and several smaller circular halls. Presumably the final plan for the scheme of 1763, never fully finished and now lost, indicated such chambers (see A. A. Tait, Robert Adam: drawings and imagination, Cambridge, 1993, p.64). The battle and historical drawings are all similar in draughtsmanship and were probably made by Antonio Zucchi (1726 - 95) in the winter of 1762/63.
This composition for the proposed Circular Hall of the Adam Parliament House contrasts with the 'Town in peace' depicted in Adam vol.7/60 and 61. Unlike the war scene in Adam vol.7/62, the soldiers are shown in contemporary dress with appropriate weapons of muskets and cannons.

Level

Drawing

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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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