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  • image SM Adam volume 44/95
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Reference number

SM Adam volume 44/95

Purpose

[152] Finished drawing for the building, c1769-76, unexecuted

Aspect

Elevation of the principal front of a two-storey, seven-bay building, with the central five bays projecting, and articulated and screened by lotus capital pilasters and columns supporting a pediment, with a clock in the tympanum, and three sculpture-filled acroteria, and with a central pedimented door, flanked by two bays of sculpture-filled niches, and with pedimented windows in the recessed end bays, and the whole has a string course of Vitruvian scroll, surmounted by rectangular panels of arabesques, a sub-frieze of rosettes, festoons and winged sphinxes, and a frieze of strigils and calyx

Scale

bar scale of 1 ½ inches to 10 feet

Inscribed

Design of a Church for Durham yard (in the hand of William Adam)

Signed and dated

  • 1769-76
    date range: 1769-76

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and wash on laid paper (599 x 488)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly William Hamilton or Joseph Bonomi, with title inscription in the hand of William Adam

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 33
King, 2001, Volume II, p. 66
Rowan, 2007, pp. 58, 59
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Vaulting Ambition: The Adam Brothers, Contractors to the Metropolis in the Reign of George III, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 14 September 2007 - 12 January 2008; The Wilson Art Gallery and Museum, Cheltenham, 19 April - 24 May 2008; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, 24 October - 13 December 2008

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).