John Adam (1721-92) was the eldest son of the famous Scottish architect and entrepreneur William Adam (1689-1748) and Mary Robertson. Adam followed his father’s career and became an architect, succeeding his father as master mason to the Board of Ordnance in the early 1740s. His lucrative work with the Board of Ordnance, such as Fort George, Inverness, helped fund the younger brothers, Robert and James’s, Grand Tours. After the death of his father, John took on a number of commissions from existing clients such as Hopetoun House, Dumfries House and Arniston House. His scheme for the Royal Exchange in Edinburgh is probably his best-known public work.

He was later made a partner in his brothers’ company, William Adam & Co, builders and builders’ merchants in 1764 and in 1768 embarked on an ambitious scheme in London with all three of his brothers (Robert, James and William) called the Adelphi. However, this speculative scheme failed due to the crash of the Ayr Bank and thrust the Adam brothers into serious financial difficulties which led to a disagreeable relationship between John and Robert. John had married Jean Ramsay in 1750, and together they had a son, the politician William Adam (1751-1839). John died in 1792 and was buried in the Adam mausoleum in Greyfriars churchyard, Edinburgh.

William Adam (1689-1748) acquired Blair Adam in 1733. It originally comprised 640 acres of barren land, but Adam soon extended it with the purchase of adjoining properties including Dowhill, Woodend and Dichend over the following fifteen years. By 1740, a small house was built on the estate and a north avenue was laid out as a formal approach. John Adam continued to work on the estate after the death of his father in 1748, extending the house with flanking wings to the north and south, and designing some Farm Offices which were only partially executed.

In 1772, Robert Adam made designs for a new house for John Adam on the Blair Adam estate. Robert proposed an attractive classical villa with a grand portico to the front, projecting pedimented sides, and a central columned bow to the rear. Internally, Robert had planned a grand entrance hall, with a columned screen at each end leading to an oval principal stair and a D-shaped backstair, with a circular vestibule in between and a double-bowed room to the rear with an external screen of columns. On one side was a large, double-apsidal room with an internal bow in a central projection, and on the other side of the house were three smaller rooms, one circular with niches in each corner.

There is a c.1772 estate plan in the Blair Adam collection, and reproduced in Robert Adam at Home, 1728-1978, which shows where the house was intended to stand to the east of the existing house in the centre of a landscaped park that John Adam was creating at the time. The designs were made at the height of the Adelphi crisis, and it would appear that as a result of these difficulties, Robert’s designs for a new house at Blair Adam were not executed.

See also: John Adam: preliminary designs and finished drawings for three pier glass frames.

Literature:
Papers of Blair Adam, Correspondence between John Adam and family, NRAS 1454; A.T. Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, Volume I, 1922, pp. 9-12; Volume II, Index, 1922, p. 4; A. Tait, Robert Adam at Home, 1728-1978, 1978, pp. 1-24; D. King, The Complete Works of Robert & James Adam and Unbuilt Adam, Volume 2, 2001, p. 122; A. Tait, ‘John Adam (1721-1792)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, online [accessed 12 June 2024]; A. Rowan, ‘Johnnie: the eldest Adam brother’, in Robert Adam and his Brothers: New light on Britain's leading architectural family, 2019, pp. 36-62

With thanks to the Arts Society Fund and the Art Fund’s Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Grant which enabled archival visits in Edinburgh to support this research, with a special thanks to Keith and Elizabeth Adam for their assistance in providing access to the private collection at Blair Adam.

Louisa Catt, 2024