Dr Frances Sands tells us about Robert Adam, the fashionable 18th-century architect whose exquisite plans and designs, inspired by Classical ruins he saw on his Grand Tour and made for London clients, are currently on show at Sir John Soane’s Museum.
Robert Adam is one of the best-known architects in British history. Born in Edinburgh in 1728, Adam was the second son of the architect William Adam, whose office he joined in 1745. The Adam family’s Edinburgh office was a burgeoning one, undertaking lucrative commissions such as the elegant Hopetoun House near Edinburgh, and the Hanoverian Highland Forts, which were built to suppress the Scots following the Jacobite uprising of 1745. Even at this early stage of his career, Adam started to show exceptional talent and, during his time working in the family firm, he earned a personal fortune of around £5,000, which enabled him to fund a lavish Grand Tour in 1754-58.
During this time, Adam travelled through France to Italy with the express purpose of continuing his architectural education and improving his drawing style under the tutelage of the French artist Charles-Louis Clérisseau. Alongside the educational opportunities that his Grand Tour offered, Adam also used the voyage as an opportunity to make his name. From Venice he travelled across the Adriatic with a team of draughtsmen to Spalatro in Dalmatia (now Split in Croatia) in order to compile material for an architectural treatise, The Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia, which was published in 1764.
This book would provide the British public with their first indepth taste of domestic antique architecture, albeit domestic architecture on an exceptionally grand scale, in the form of an imperial palace. Furthermore, the publication helped to legitimise Adam’s novel ideas for domestic planning and interior design, offering antique precedents for similar forms.
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