Academic exercise showing the plan and elevation of a stepped dome octagon that has a pedimented doorway with decorative panel above flanked by two windows with swags and rosettes above. Below, the plan shows eight openings, one a doorway that opposite blind to the chimneypiece.

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Robert and James Adam travel drawings
- Adam volume 19

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Reference number

Adam vol.19/114

Purpose

Academic exercise showing the plan and elevation of a stepped dome octagon that has a pedimented doorway with decorative panel above flanked by two windows with swags and rosettes above. Below, the plan shows eight openings, one a doorway that opposite blind to the chimneypiece.

Aspect

Plan, elevation

Signed and dated

Undated, but between 1756/7 and 1760

Medium and dimensions

Pen, grey wash390 x 255

Hand

Adam Scottish Office

Watermark

crowned shield with fleur de lys

Notes

In the opinion of A. A. Tait, this drawing relates in time and place or subject to those contained in Adam volume 7.This is the most complex design in the group of pavilion exercises (see Adam vol.19/107-114), of which there is a more elaborate version in Adam vol.19/113. The idea may have been taken from Isaac Ware, A Complete Body of Architecture (London, 1756/7, published in weekly parts), where he divided his garden pavilions into three: '1. A simple. 2. A more ornamented, and, 3. A nobler, more elevated, and more expensive' (see pl.101, p.640). The composition may also be compared with a similar one in James Gibbs, A Book of Architecture (London, 1728, p.81), a copy of which was in the library at Blair Adam. William Adam also subscribed to the volume.

Level

Drawing

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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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