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  • image Adam vol.9/59
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Reference number

Adam vol.9/59

Purpose

Academic study for the plan of a large building with circular and rectangular colonnaded courts in the centre, enclosed by another large courtyard with hemicycle at the top, incorporating a pavilion with portico.

Aspect

Planverso perspective, details

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 59verso inscribed one line in ink and subsequently deleted

Signed and dated

  • Undated, c1756

Medium and dimensions

Pen198 x 205

Hand

Robert Adam

Verso

Perspective ink drawing of a symmetrical building with four corner tower, central dome and porticoes in a landscape. Also two details, one for a rococo Gothic window, which is of the type found in Adam volume 54, Series 4 and in Adam vol.55/4 and 20. Both the elevation and plan here have been deliberately obscured or cancelled.

Notes

This composition can be compared with those in Adam vol.9/58 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 striking hemicycle at the top of the composition can be compared with the smaller version found in Adam vol.55/10.

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).