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  • image Adam vol.9/37
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Reference number

Adam vol.9/37

Purpose

Academic study for the plan for a large, square, symmetrical building, possibly a mausoleum, with four projecting porticoes and four circular corner towers. Each of these has five apses and opens down a triple-aisled corridor onto a circular hall that has a free-standing colonnade.

Aspect

Plan

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 37

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 - 56.

Medium and dimensions

Pen, grey wash124 x 130

Hand

Robert Adam (attributed to)

Notes

This plan may be inspired by the design for a college by Giovanni Battista Piranesi from his Opere Varie di Architettura, 1750, or by a scheme for a mausoleum such as that by Filippo Juvarra (1678-1736) for Louis XIV. It belongs with smaller studies, such as Adam vol.9/25 and 26, in the similarity of the use of wash and the chalk underdrawing. There are smaller versions of a similar scheme in Adam vol.55/14 and 55/17, the latter unfinished. The saltire plan is a variation of the centre section of the plan in Adam vol.9/39.

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).