Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Preliminary designs, finished drawings and a record drawing for the house, 1762, partly executed with alterations (10)

Browse

Purpose

Preliminary designs, finished drawings and a record drawing for the house, 1762, partly executed with alterations (10)

Notes

The executed house, although never finished, was more like the second scheme seen in the finished and record drawings (Adam volumes 43/25-43/32) than Adam's rough preliminary designs (Adam volumes 54/7/219-54/7/220.

Various connections between the designs for Witham and other Adam projects have been made. Harris has compared the saloon with the library at Kenwood, with apsidal ends screened by columns. She has suggested that it was probably intended to have a similar barrel-vaulted ceiling, but there is no graphic evidence for this as presumably the house was abandoned after Beckford's death in 1770, before this element had been installed. King notes that there are similarities in the architectural design for Witham and Great Saxham House, Longleat, and the Royal College of Physicians. Wilson-North and Porter note similarities with Harewood and Mersham-le-Hatch.

Level

Group

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).  


Contents of Preliminary designs, finished drawings and a record drawing for the house, 1762, partly executed with alterations (10)