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Purpose
Signed and dated
- 1763
Notes
The Audley End account books, in the Essex Record Office, record that Adam made designs for a monument to Lady Portsmouth in 1763. These three extant drawings presumably represent the design in question. The monument was not executed in 1763, but in 1774 an urn-topped Tuscan column was erected to Lady Portsmouth's memory by Joseph Dixon (d1787), 1,000 yards north-east of the house. Dixon’s monument remains in situ.
See also: Audley End; Saville Row, number 10
Literature:
R. Chamberlin, and R. Gray, Audley End, 1986, p. 1; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam & unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume 1, pp. 380, 386, Volume 2, p. 261; J. Bettley, and N. Pevsner, The buildings of England: Essex, 2007, pp. 96, 104
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).