Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Academic study for the plan of a building with one five-bay double portico and another single portico of three bays; on either side are wings with apsidal pavilions. It is enclosed in a hemicycle of pilasters or piers.
  • image Adam vol.9/58
Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image
Print this image in A4 view  (icon indicating printer link)

Reference number

Adam vol.9/58

Purpose

Academic study for the plan of a building with one five-bay double portico and another single portico of three bays; on either side are wings with apsidal pavilions. It is enclosed in a hemicycle of pilasters or piers.

Aspect

Plan

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 58

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably c1756

Medium and dimensions

Pen, grey wash on brown tracing paper146 x 203

Hand

Robert Adam

Notes

This composition is dominated by the large hemicycle that appears again in the drawings in Adam vol.9/59 and 61, and like them it may be related to Robert Adam's proposal of 1756 for rebuilding the centre of Lisbon, Portugal, destroyed in the fire and earthquake of 1755 (see K. Maxwell, Pombal, Paradox of the Enlightenment, Cambridge, 1995, and A. A. Tait, Robert Adam: drawings and imagination, Cambridge, 1993, pp.40-50). The use of brown paper is unusual among Robert Adam's Roman drawings; there are no other examples in this volume or the related volume 55.

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).