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  • image Adam vol.7/140
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Reference number

Adam vol.7/140

Purpose

London: Parliament House (designs for). Design for an urn with finial and two handles terminated in figures; the centre is decorated with four classical figures in relief; it is set on a spreading base.

Aspect

Detail

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink in a contemporary hand M.r Pit to the King

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1762/63

Medium and dimensions

Pen on buff paper 150 x 72

Hand

James Adam

Notes

This drawing is a companion to Adam vol.7/139 and can likewise be connected to James Adam's Parliament House scheme of 1762/63. The inscription may refer to William Pitt (1708-78), the politician, who became Earl of Chatham in 1766. However, there is another Pitts who was a contemporary silversmith associated with the Adam Office (see R. Rowe, Adam Silver, London, 1965, pp.43-4). The King is George III who ascended to the throne in 1760. There are no other versions of this design amongst the silver designs in Adam volume 25.

This drawing was lent to the exhibition The Classical Ideal, English Silver 1760 - 1840, Koopman Rare Art, London, 3 - 25 June 2010

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

The Classical Ideal: English Silver 1760-1840, Koopman Rare Art, London, 3 - 25 June 2010

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).