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  • image Adam vol.7/115
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Reference number

Adam vol.7/115

Purpose

London: Parliament House (designs for). Design for a relief panel showing a naval battle with a ship in flames amongst several other ships. In the foreground are seamen in three small boats or lifeboats cutting hawsers.

Aspect

Elevation

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1762-63

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, brown wash with white heightening on brown washed paper173 x 466

Hand

Antonio Zucchi

Notes

This is part of a set of four historical panels (Adam vol.7/114-117) that deal with aspects of British history and are by Antonio Zucchi (1726-95) for James Adam's Parliament House scheme of 1762/63. Presumably the grouping is deliberate and they all delineate important incidents in British history. This scene is probably the arrival of the fireships amongst the Spanish warships of the Armada in 1588. The ships are largely of an appropriate design for the late sixteenth century, as is the costume of the sailors.

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).