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Reference number

Adam vol.9/43

Purpose

Academic study for the plan for a large public building composed as a rectangular courtyard with hemicycle ends separated by a screen of pavilions and colonnades. In the central island is a large symmetrical rectangular pavilion with five-bay porticoes facing each hemicycle.

Aspect

Plan

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 43; in pencil 43 and 44

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1755 or 56

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, grey wash343 x 450, vertical foldline

Hand

Robert Adam

Watermark

lines of names, coat of arms, butterfly type

Notes

This is a much enlarged design of the type shown in Adam vol.10/1 and it can also be related to the plans shown in Adam vol.9/1 verso, which are drawn on a sheet of similar size and watermark. Other sketches, such as 9/31 and 53, show plans of similar scale. The drawing here is not fully finished, only one fountain is shown in the pavilion squares and there are pencil suggestions on the central island. The scale of the plan suggests its source is the Roman Baths, or in imperial structures at Tivoli, Italy or the Domus Augustana in Rome, Italy. The Baths are perhaps the most likely, for Robert Adam spent an inordinate amount of time measuring and recording them for his revision of A.B. Desgodetz, Les Édifices Antiques de Rome, Paris, 1682 - drawings that have now disappeared although they were finished when Adam left Rome in April 1757. In 1755 he wrote to his brother James that 'what I wanted most was Lord Burlington's Book of the Diocletian & Caracalla Baths'. It is simple to see this plan as a compendium of obvious forms from the Baths, such as the circular temples of Agrippa, the central island of Caracalla, the hemicycle ends from Diocletian. An alternative design for part of the composition is found in Adam vol.9/44. It is possible that drawings such as this were among those that caught the public eye when displayed in Lower Grosvenor Street, London in 1758.

Literature

Rep. A. A. Tait, Robert Adam, The Creative Mind: from the sketch to the finished drawing, catalogue of an exhibition at Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 1996, p.13

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Robert Adam, The Creative Mind: from the Sketch to the Finished Drawing, Sir John Soane's Museum, 4 October 1996 - 1 March 1997; The Frick Collection, New York, December 1997 - April 1998; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, May - June 1998; The Octagon Museum, Washington, July 1998 - January 1999; Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, February - March 1999
The Adam Brothers in Rome: Drawings from the Grand Tour, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 25 September 2008 - 14 February 2009

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).