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Purpose
Signed and dated
- 1766
Notes
It is possible that John Luke Nichol is in fact John Nicholls (1744/5-1832), the son of Francis Nicholls, physician to King George II, a lawyer who served as MP for Bletchingley in 1783-87, and Tregony in 1796-1802. Nicholls was a friend and ally of Henry Fox, Lord Holland, another of Adam’s patrons, and it may have been through this connection that Robert Adam came to Nicholls’s attention.
Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index pp. 56, 82; E. Harris, The furniture of Robert Adam, 1963, Index p. 59; E. Harris, The genius of Robert Adam: his interiors, 2001, p. 341; J.A. Cannon, 'Nicholls, John (?1745-1832), of Goring, Oxon. and Ockley, Surr.', R.G. Thorne, 'Nicholls, John (1744-1832), of Goring, Oxon. and Ockley, Surr', History of Parliament online, 2012
Frances Sands, 2012
Level
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).