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This house was an Adelphi lottery prize won by Robert and James themselves, with an annual rent of £230. The Adam brothers themselves moved to number 4 Royal Terrace in 1772, moving to 3 Robert Street in 1778, and then to 13 Albermarle Street in 1786. The brothers' offices were located at number 12 John Street.
When Robert and James left this house in 1778, it was taken by the ‘quack’ Doctor James Graham (1745-94), a Scottish doctor, the son of an Edinburgh saddler. He came to the Adelphi and reputedly spent £10,000 to fit out his ‘Temple of Health’. The Adelphi house was too expensive for Graham to maintain, and he left again in 1781. In 1790-97 the house was lived in by an artist, John Henderson; in 1798-1807 by Sir Brook Watson (1735-1807), a merchant; in 1811-35 by Sir William Bolland (1771-1840), a lawyer and bibliophile under whose tenancy the Roxburghe Club was founded in the house; in 1861-72 by Octavian Blewitt (1810-84), secretary of the Royal Literary Fund; and in 1888-1901 Richard D’Oyly Carte (1844-1901), a concert agent.
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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).
Contents of Number 4, Royal Terrace
- Design for the chimneypiece for the front drawing room, c1769-70, unexecuted (1)
- Finished drawing for the ceiling for the back drawing room, 1769; it is not known if this design was executed (1)
- Design for the chimneypiece for the front parlour, c1769-70; it is not known if this design was executed (1)
- Preliminary design and finished drawing for a mirror frame for the study, 1772; it is not known if this design was executed (2)