[9] Finished drawing for a crescent on the riverfront, c1773-82

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Public buildings
  - New Town, Bath, Somerset: unexecuted street scheme commissioned by William Pulteney, 1777-82 (9)
    - Finished drawing for a crescent on the riverfront, c1773-82, unexecuted (1)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 38/1

Purpose

[9] Finished drawing for a crescent on the riverfront, c1773-82

Aspect

View of two crescent-shaped terraces facing the river, supported by an arcaded undercroft. Each of the two terraces is composed of a three-and-a-half-storey, twenty-bay building, with the five bays at each end projecting and articulated by giant engaged Corinthian columns; containing a central three-bay bow which is surmounted by a balustrade. Between the two terraces there is a distant view of a third V-shaped block making use of a similar ornamental composition

Scale

measured

Inscribed

Perspective View of a Crescent at Bath (in the hand of William Adam and underwritten in pencil) (verso) 1 / Number 1 (in red pen) / Perspective View of Crescent

Signed and dated

1773-82
date range: 1773-82

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, wash and coloured washes including sepia and cerulean blue on laid paper (1337 x 502)

Hand

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

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 3
King, 2001, Volume 2, p. 76
Rowan, 2007, p. 68
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).