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  • image Image 1 for Adam vol.7/185
  • image Image 2 for Adam vol.7/185
  • image Image 1 for Adam vol.7/185
  • image Image 2 for Adam vol.7/185

Reference number

Adam vol.7/185

Purpose

Design for the plan of a small rectangular house with a three-bay recessed centre and two bays on either side. The interior has straight and spiral stairs and four large apartments.

Aspect

Plan verso plan

Inscribed

verso Inscribed in pencil in a contemporary hand To have a small / wind's and niches in / the angle

Signed and dated

  • Undated

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil 189 x 308, folded with a vertical fold line

Hand

James Adam (attributed to)

Verso

Academic study in pen and grey ink for a large building showing a five-bay portico opening onto a long rectangular hall, with circular rooms at either end. Beyond is another circular hall with columns, two porticoes and an apsidal apartment. This plan is close to several of the academic exercises found in Adam volume 55 and is therefore the counterpart to Robert Adam's work with Laurent-Benoít Dewez (1731-1812). Like the drawing on the recto, the hand is probably James Adam's.

Watermark

Crown in circle [part]

Notes

The hand of both recto and verso is probably James Adam's. A similar type of exercise can be found in Adam vol.7/213. Both can be related to the Roman schemes for a symmetrical pavilion by Robert Adam found in Adam volume 9 (see the hatched plan in Adam vol.9/7). Such an academic drawing probably belongs to the 1761-3 period when James Adam was working with Charles Louis-Clérisseau and his circle in Rome following a course similar to Robert's.

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).