Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  London: Parliament House (designs for). Design for a fountain on an architectural base with water jet from an urn supported by three figures. The drawing is partly overlapped by the design for a throne with royal arms supported by a lion and unicorn on the head of the back, with two cabriole legs and stretcher, heavily decorated and upholstered. Also on the sheet is detail of leg with ball and claw foot.
  • image Adam vol.7/210
Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image
Print this image in A4 view  (icon indicating printer link)

Reference number

Adam vol.7/210

Purpose

London: Parliament House (designs for). Design for a fountain on an architectural base with water jet from an urn supported by three figures. The drawing is partly overlapped by the design for a throne with royal arms supported by a lion and unicorn on the head of the back, with two cabriole legs and stretcher, heavily decorated and upholstered. Also on the sheet is detail of leg with ball and claw foot.

Aspect

Elevations verso details

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1762-63

Medium and dimensions

Black chalk 421 x 276

Hand

James Adam, Office of

Verso

Design in black chalk for a domed baldacchino with four columns on steps with a throne; above is a detail of a baldacchino dome supported by dolphins. The finished drawing for the baldacchino is in Adam vol.7/70.

Notes

The drawings on both recto and verso are part of James Adam's Parliament House scheme of 1762/63. The fountain here is a sketch for that in Adam vol.7/109 but differs considerably in detail. The throne is probably an alternative to the more classical design shown in Adam vol.7/202 verso and was also intended for below the baldacchino as the drawing on the verso makes clear. 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.

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).