Browse
Purpose
Signed and dated
- 1775
1775
Notes
Robert Adam met Wood during his Grand Tour in Rome in 1755. They became friends, and in a letter to his sister, Betty, of the same year, Adam described Wood as a man ‘whose character is one of the most perfect among the Human Race. He is of universal learning possess'd of all Languages and having travelled all over the World to the best of purposes, has fund of stories serious and diverting which adapts him to all Capacities as a Learned, or as a Jovial Companion. He is intimate with all great people and all Nations and esteemed by those of his own, I mean of England.’
Owing to their friendship it is perhaps unsurprising that Adam made a design for a funerary monument to Wood who had been buried in a vault designed by Joseph Wilton in the burial ground on Upper Richmond Road, Putney. The scheme was not executed, and there are no known Adam drawings for the executed design, which comprises a sarcophagus ornamented with swags, anthemia, Doric columns, putti masks, skulls and an inscription by Horace Walpole. It is not known who designed the executed monument, but its style is not suggestive of Adam’s work.
Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index pp. 59, 91; J. Fleming, Robert Adam and his circle, 1962, p. 148; G. Beard, The work of Robert Adam, 1978, p. 55; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume I, pp. 381, 389, Volume II, p. 267; ‘Wood, Robert (1716/17-1771)’, Oxford dictionary of national biography online
Frances Sands, 2014
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).