The Adam family

The king of classical motifs, Robert Adam festooned late-18th-century London with exquisite plasterwork, fluted columns and fanciful pilasters, but, in his drive to succeed, he nearly lost it all

- Carla Passino

THE road to London runs through Rome. Or so it did for Robert Adam, who left his native Scotland (and a place in the family’s established, but regional practice) for a European Grand Tour that eventually propelled him to worldwide architectural glory. Adam headed to Italy in 1754, at the age of 26, and became part of an international circle that included architectural designer Charles-Louis Clérisseau and artist and engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi. He had ambition—‘Scotland is but a narrow place,’ he once wrote, revealing his desire for ‘a greater, more extensive and more honourable scene’—and the determination to pursue it, even when this required a rather elastic relationship with the truth: cultivating for a time the image of the distinguished dilettante, he embellished his stories with the odd, well-timed ‘lye’, as he openly admitted to his family.

By the time he returned to Britain in 1757, the Scottish squire had become a gentleman of the world and London was his proverbial oyster. Adam made neo-Classicism his own, replacing the (occasionally stuck-up) rigour of the Palladians with an elegant, imaginative style that fished from the wide pool of Classical and Renaissance architecture and combined different elements with gusto. From putti to Corinthian leaves, no classical motif was left behind, although his signature trait was perhaps movement, often created with the generous recourse to apses and pilasters.