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  • image Adam vol.26/120
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Reference number

Adam vol.26/120

Purpose

Two studies for façades of three bays. That at the top shows a church with projecting entrance tower with rusticated base, with a clock and steeple above. Below this is a mausoleum, with a tapering obelisk of three tiers with oval windows, above a rusticated, pedimented doorway.

Aspect

Elevations verso plan

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink James Adam Invt. 1752 and Jas. Adam invt. 1752

Signed and dated

  • 1752

Medium and dimensions

Pen 234 x 102, two sheets joined, the upper trimmed to apprximately silhouette the subject

Hand

James Adam

Notes

These are similar to the academic studies in Adam vol.26/118 and 141, the latter also dated 1752. All may be compared with several drawings at Blair Adam, Scotland that show three-bay buildings in elevation (see BA 215-7) and belong to the period c.1752. The elevations here may be connected with James Adam's design for Cumnock Church, Ayrshire, Scotland, 1753 (see Clerk collection, Scotland), built the following year. The steeple in the lower elevation is similar to that on William Adam's Dundee Town House of 1732-5 (see J. Simpson, 'The Practical Architect', Architectural Heritage, I, Edinburgh, 1990, p.79). The lower spire appears as faint underdrawing at the top of the sheet in Adam vol.26/141.
The top drawing has been trimmed to correspond to the outline of the building (see also Adam vol.56/172).

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

The Adam Brothers in Rome: Drawings from the Grand Tour, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 25 September 2008 - 14 February 2009

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).