Scale
1 in to 13 ft
Signed and dated
Medium and dimensions
Pen, grey wash with black ink framing line
219 x 273
Hand
Adam Scottish Office
Notes
The drawings in Adam vol.7/120-124 show four plans and an elevation for the same villa; the composition with corner towers was a familiar one in the Scottish practice of William Adam and, after 1748, of John Adam and his brothers. This building can be related to the James Adam scheme of 1756 in Adam vol.7/17, as well as to other villa plans in the Blair Adam Collection (see BA 594; see also Architectural History, vol.20, 1977, pl.59). The outstanding example of this towered plan type is William Adam's Duff House, Banff, Scotland of 1735-41. The draughtsmanship here is typical of the Scottish Office in the 1750s and can be compared with the drawing style of the Adam Hot and Cold Baths scheme of c.1755 in the Blair Adam Collection, the façade design of which is close to the elevation here in composition and technique (see BA 430 and a smaller version of 1752 in BA 189). There are also a series of pavilion exercises in Adam vol.19/109-114; like such schemes these drawings are probably academic exercises and associated with James Adam.
Level
Drawing
Exhibition history
The Adam Brothers in Rome: Drawings from the Grand Tour, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 25 September 2008 - 14 February 2009
Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation
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).
