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  • image Adam vol.6/90
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Reference number

Adam vol.6/90

Purpose

Design for a sarcophagus-shaped bath with strigillation and garlands supported by two mermaids. On top is a shell and dolphin backpiece held by two more mermaids. Below is a plan of an oval bath with four feet.

Aspect

Elevation, plans

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink in a contemporary hand A Bath for a Room in the Stile of the Antique / Decem'r 1744. R.A

Signed and dated

  • Despite inscribed date of 1744, 1774 is more likely

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil290 x 202

Hand

Robert Adam

Watermark

coat of arms with lion [English mid-eighteenth century]

Notes

In the opinion of A. A. Tait, this drawing relates in time and place or subject to those contained in Adam volume 56. If the inscribed date could be accepted, the drawing would be made by Robert Adam aged 16 and, with the landscape view in Adam vol.56/14 dated September 1744, one of the earliest drawings in the Adam collection. However, the pen draughtsmanship is too advanced for such a date, as is the neo-classical style of the composition. It is much closer to the other drawings in the volume of the 1774/5 period. It seems highly likely that in inking over the pencil inscription, 1774 was misread as 1744. Such a drawing process can be seen in Adam vol.6/97, a similar drawing with the same watermark and dated 1774.

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).