Three studies showing an obelisk on a square base with a circular relief panel on top of a supporting vault with two simple doorways and a plain rectangular window above.

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Robert and James Adam travel drawings
- Adam Volume 26

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Reference number

Adam vol.26/119a, 119b, 119c

Purpose

Three studies showing an obelisk on a square base with a circular relief panel on top of a supporting vault with two simple doorways and a plain rectangular window above.

Aspect

Plan, elevations

Scale

Scale on 119c 1 inch to 10 feet

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink in a contemporary hand Front representing the Door (119a); Section upon the Line A B. (119b); Plan of the Obelisk. (119c)

Signed and dated

Undated

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pink and grey wash 133 x 95 (119a); 133 x 94 (119b); 328 x 70 (119c)

Hand

William Adam, Office of

Watermark

CM on 119c IV

Notes

These three studies were originally part of the same sheet and divided later. The handwriting and style of draughtsmanship is typical of William Adam's office, and is similar to the academic exercise for Hot and Cold Baths (see A. A. Tait, Robert Adam: drawings and imagination, Cambridge, 1993, p.7). In the Blair Adam collection, Scotland, there is a sketch of obelisks (see BA 200) and several variations after James Gibbs, A Book of Architecture, London, 1728 (see particularly Adam vol.19/107).

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.

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