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  • image Adam vol.26/170
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Reference number

Adam vol.26/170

Purpose

Unfinished record drawing of the decoration for a semi-circular panel divided in two by grotesque borders with a central oval panel showing a figure in a chariot; part of foliage border. Below this is another version of the semi-circular panel which is also incomplete.

Aspect

Detail

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink in a contemporary hand From Mr Buiers at Rome

Signed and dated

  • Undated but possibly from after Adam's return from Italy. The lower drawing below may be later

Medium and dimensions

Black chalk, pen 500 x 332

Hand

Giuseppe Manocchi (attributed to), after James Byres. The lower drawing, Robert Adam, (attributed to)

Notes

This drawing belongs with several other designs as coming from James Byres (1734-1817). The inscription relating to James Byres appears in the same hand on other ceiling designs, Adam vol.26/166, 167, 174 and 176, and it would suggest that they were inscribed in London. All are unfinished and may well be copies, probably by Giuseppe Manocchi (1731-82), after the complete originals. James Byres turned from painting to architecture c.1758 while in Rome, and in 1762 he won a prize in the Concorso Clementino. At that time he was known to James Adam's circle (see J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, p.378). There is an album of finished ceiling designs attributed to Byres in the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, USA (see J. Harris, Catalogue of British Drawings for Architecture, Decoration, Sculpture and Landscape Gardening 1550-1900 in American Collections, New Jersey, 1971, p.41).
The lower version of the panel in chalk simplifies both the borders and the vase compositions in the two quadrants, and this may well be a later drawing in the hand of Robert Adam. The juxtaposition makes quite clear the practical role such compositions had in the Adam office and, presumably, the need for office copies such as these.

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).