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  • image Adam vol.7/171
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Reference number

Adam vol.7/171

Purpose

Unfinished plan for a theatre showing the auditorium with seven-bay portico flanked internally by staircases opening into a rectangular hall and semi-circular seating space. Beyond are stage and scenary openings.

Aspect

Plan

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink in a contemporary hand with some dimensions

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1762-63

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil 343 x 442

Hand

James Adam

Watermark

CM

Notes

This is the plan of the theatre elevation shown in Adam vol.7/170, and is a version of the ink sketch in Adam vol.7/176. The Adam library contained Carlo Fontana (1634/8–1714)'s compendium of seventeenth-century theatre designs that Robert Adam used for his work at Drury Lane and the Haymarket Opera House, both London. The use of hatching in this plan may be compared with that in plans by James Adam of 1756 in Adam vol.7/17.
The first parliament of the reign of George III began in 1760 and this drawing belongs to that period, and is probably contemporary with James Adam's Parliament House scheme of 1762/63; like that scheme it may have been begun before he left London for Italy in 1760.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

'Bob the Roman': Heroic Antiquity and the Architecture of Robert Adam, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 27 June - 27 September 2003; New York School of Interior Design Gallery, 29 September - 4 December 2004

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).