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  • image Adam vol.7/87
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Reference number

Adam vol.7/87

Purpose

London: Parliament House (designs for). Designs for three long rectangular panels each composed of foliage and rosette decoration, and incorporating national and royal symbols. The top panel has the Irish harp; the middle panel has the royal arms; and the bottom panel has the lion and unicorn.

Aspect

Elevations

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1762-63

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil 306 x 450

Hand

James Adam, Office of

Watermark

Villandry

Notes

The use of such national and royal symbols indicates that these panels were intended for the decoration of James Adam's Parliament House scheme of 1762/63. A similar use of these iconographical forms can be found in Adam vol.7/81 and 112. Like them, the symbols are derived from antique sources such as those shown in James Adam's collection of drawings after the antique in Adam volume 26; for example Adam vol.26/45, which relates to the bottom panel here.

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).