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  • image SM Adam volume 28/46
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Reference number

SM Adam volume 28/46

Purpose

[14] Finished drawing showing an axial section through the ballroom, c1765-68, unexecuted

Aspect

Off-centre axial section through the ballroom as seen in the plan (Adam volume 28/49), showing the central two-storey ballroom, with a coved ceiling, above a frieze of putti, urns and arabesques with a large central apse, screened by four fluted Corinthian columns, and containing a chimneypiece flanked by apses screened by Ionic columns, and with coffered semi domes, and each of the chimneypieces and apses surmounted by rectangular relief panels, and a sub-frieze of winged half-figures and naturalistic anthemia, and the apse is flanked by pedimented windows, rectangular overwindow relief panels, and a sub-frieze of putti and festoons, and the ballroom is flanked by rooms on the ground, mezzanine and second storeys, and the whole is surmounted by a pitched roof

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

Section through the Ball and Court Room at Bath (in the hand of William Adam)

Signed and dated

  • 1765-68
    date range: c1765-68 (see scheme notes)

Medium and dimensions

Pen, wash, and pink and yellow washes within a double ruled border on laid paper (116 x 561)

Hand

Adam office hand, with title inscription in the hand of William Adam. For the finished drawings made for the Adam brothers’ unexecuted Bath Assembly Rooms scheme, it is difficult to assign a specific draughtsman’s hand as the date is not exact; they are drawn in the Adam office in-house style, and the author could be any one of around seven or eight draughtsmen including Robert Nasmith, Giuseppe Sacco, William Hamilton, J.P. Laurent or Joseph Bonomi.

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 3
King, 2001, Volume II, p. 53
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

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).