The occasion for this publication was the 2016–17 exhibition of a selection of the 8,000 drawings by Robert Adam at the Sir John Soane’s Museum. The exhibition recorded his projects in central London. In recent years, the museum has established a formidable database catalogue of the drawings compiled by the author of this book. The question, therefore, is whether this volume stands free of the exhibition that generated its production, and whether it is even necessary, given the existence of so thorough a database and the wealth of scholarship on Adam that we already have.
When Adam returned from Italy in 1758 he set up business as a prospective architect, first in Mayfair and later in Lower Grosvenor Street. It is telling that the key element of Adam’s showcase for his visiting clients was first and foremost not the architectural models of key ancient monuments, both newly made and collected from French and other sources that John Nash and John Soane were to present to their interested public, but his own collection of antique stone and marble fragments in the form of plaques, festoons, urns, plinths and inscriptions encased in wreaths or moulded borders. The arrangement of these is recorded in a key drawing of 1759, illustrated here. This reminds us why so much scholarship – especially at the hands of the American Damie Stillman (Reference Stillman1966) – has in the past been devoted to Adam’s sources of ornament. It was the command of his experience of travel (as far afield as Diocletian’s palace of Spalatro, the subject of Adam’s famous publication) and his ability to work all of this into a varied and modern decorative order that most attracted clients, in addition to his skill at choosing the appropriate decorative idiom and scale for domestic interiors. This is most evident on the outskirts of London in the contrast between his high Roman, grand ducal spaces for the duke and duchess of Northumberland at Syon and his more varied and colourful solutions to somewhat smaller spaces for the nouveau riche banking family of Child at Osterley. Adam’s work for the City and West End of London included speculative schemes across all forms of domestic and public building; included here are his designs for the Admiralty Screen, the castellar façade for the King’s Bench prison, for the royal Buckingham House and, most ambitiously, his response to a competition announced in 1771 for the façade of Lincoln’s Inn facing Chancery Lane. While it would be unfair to see Adam as simply a façade architect, when it comes to his public buildings he certainly emerges as an ingenious provider of street-facing architectural spectacle. He does not, in this huge number of London projects, ever get the chance to envision a grand, multi-building scheme as Nash was to do in his largely realised creation of contrasting vistas through London from The Mall to the northern end of Regent’s Park, or as George Dance the Younger was to evoke in his unrealised schemes for the Port of the City of London with its great crescents facing each other across the Thames.
Adam was denied such chances because he lacked the constancy of significant power and patronage that Nash enjoyed from George iv as Prince of Wales, regent and king, or Dance as clerk of the City Works for almost half a century. Adam’s patronage was wide, but often fragile. Yet, it was through this that his greatest gift to London was achieved: a series of extraordinary town-houses that provided ingenious solutions to planning reception and living spaces on restricted and often narrow sites. There were also spectacular solutions to the staircase, most beautifully exhibited here by the section through Home House. Four of these London houses were very thoroughly surveyed through surviving documents and drawings some years ago by Eileen Harris in her book The Genius of Robert Adam (Reference Harris2001), but Frances Sands here records many more.
Following a short introduction, the book documents each of the London projects with highly focused attention to circumstances of commission, the progress (or not) of work, the design solutions and the subsequent history of the site. At every stage, the drawings themselves are points of reference and are reproduced in full colour, especially important for internal fittings and furniture given Adam’s close attention to colouration, to gilding and to the rendering of different materials. Details from a contemporary map of London are overlaid with indications of exactly where all of Adam’s commissions were found (therefore, forty-eight sites are marked). Thus, the book does indeed do great service as a scholarly introduction to the riches of the Adam collection at the museum. Since the drawings, albeit dismembered, came into the collection from an impoverished Adam office after the architect’s death, the book also emphasises the key role that Soane himself played in protecting this legacy and recognising the unique part that Adam played in creatively working the classical past into British architecture.
