Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  London: Parliament House (designs for). Unfinished design for the lower part of a portico with basement and external staircases. Also on the sheet is a plan of staircase and landings; two details of a panelled door; geometric diagrams.
  • image Adam vol.7/202
Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image
Print this image in A4 view  (icon indicating printer link)

Reference number

Adam vol.7/202

Purpose

London: Parliament House (designs for). Unfinished design for the lower part of a portico with basement and external staircases. Also on the sheet is a plan of staircase and landings; two details of a panelled door; geometric diagrams.

Aspect

Elevation, plans, details verso details

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink in a later hand a chair on other side

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1762-63

Medium and dimensions

Pen, grey wash, black chalk with brush try-outs in upper left 265 x 400

Hand

James Adam, Office of

Verso

Design in black and brown chalks for a baldacchino showing a detail for the top of the canopy, the throne and a view of canopy and throne on steps; details of decoration. This shows clearly how the throne was to be placed below the baldacchino. The inspiration for his design lay in examples found in numerous Roman churches, of which the baroque baldacchino for St Peter's by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) was the most notable, and that for Santa Maria Maggiore of c.1743 by Ferdinando Fuga (1699-1782) the most contemporary. The baldacchino is also shown in Adam vol.7/70 and there is another throne design on the verso of Adam vol.7/210. The leg details may be compared with those in Adam vol.7/97 verso.

Notes

All these drawings and sketches on both recto and verso are connected with James Adam's Parliament House scheme of 1762/63. The part of the portico at the lower part of the sheet is a sketch for the elevation in Adam vol.7/77.

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).