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  • image SM Adam volume 43/35
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Reference number

SM Adam volume 43/35

Purpose

[1] Design for an unknown house, 1775, unexecuted

Aspect

Plan of the ground storey of a house, with a central block, five bays across the principal front, with tripartite windows in the end bays, and the central three-bays recessed behind a screen of columns, and the underside of a tapering staircase, and with nine bays across the garden front, with three-bay bows in the end bays, and the central three bays with a portico, and with the central bay blind, and the central block is flanked by two-bay links, three-bay pavilions, with the central bay containing a tripartite window on the principal front, both being blind on the left-hand pavilion, and the central bay being slightly projecting on both principal fronts, and beyond each pavilion is a quatrefoil-shaped court, and the house contains service rooms on this storey

Scale

3/4 inch to 10 feet

Inscribed

Plan of the Ground Story of a house for / James Alexander Esqr (of a house for James Alexander Esqr in the hand of William Adam and underwritten in pencil) / Wine in Bottles / Wine in Casks / Area / Butler's Room / Steward's Room / Area / Pantry / Store Room / Beer Cellar / Passage / Housekeepers Room / Servants Hall / Kitchen / Wash House / Larder / Larder / Scullery / Privy / Court and some measurements given (verso) 3

Signed and dated

  • 1775
    datable to 1775

Medium and dimensions

Pen and pencil within a treble ruled border on laid paper (638 x 497)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly Robert Adam or Joseph Bonomi, with additions to title inscription in the hand of William Adam

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 52
King, 2001, Volume II, p. 135
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

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).