A Middlesex house for a duke, entered through a black-and-white marble hall and an anteroom of twelve green marble columns dredged from the Tiber (1762–1769)
Isleworth, London
Syon House, remodelled for the 1st Duke of Northumberland.
Architecture · Classical & Renaissance
Robert Adam
1728–1792 · Scottish
Neoclassicism; the Adam style
Robert Adam was the leading British architect of the later eighteenth century and, with his brother James, the inventor of a total decorative style that reached from the plan of a house to its door handles. Trained by a Grand Tour that included measuring Diocletian's palace at Split, he replaced heavy Palladian rules with what he called 'movement' — varied, contrasted spaces and delicate low-relief ornament in pastel colours. Much of his best work is the remodelling of other men's houses.
How to spot them
- ▸Pastel walls with white plasterwork: urns, husks, honeysuckle, rams' heads, arabesques and fan patterns
- ▸Rooms of contrasted shapes — apse, rotunda, oval, screen of columns — strung along an axis
- ▸The whole interior designed at once, down to carpets that echo the ceiling, mirrors, grates and doorknobs
- ▸Worked with his brother James; the Adelphi speculation nearly ruined them
Key buildings
A Derbyshire house whose Marble Hall of twenty alabaster columns imitates a Roman atrium, behind a south front modelled on a triumphal arch (1760–1770)
Derbyshire, England
Kedleston Hall for Sir Nathaniel Curzon; the Viceroy's House in Delhi was later modelled on it.
A Tudor mansion given a great open Ionic portico across its courtyard, with an Etruscan dressing room inside (1761–1780)
Isleworth, London
Osterley Park, remodelled for the banking Child family; Horace Walpole praised the Etruscan Dressing Room.
A Hampstead villa whose library ends in twin apses screened by columns, under a ceiling painted by Zucchi (1764–1779)
Hampstead, London
Kenwood House, remodelled for the 1st Earl of Mansfield; it now holds the Iveagh Bequest.
An Ayrshire castle on a sea cliff, entered by a bridge and centred on an oval staircase, given to an American general in gratitude (1777–1792)
Ayrshire, Scotland
Culzean Castle for the 10th Earl of Cassillis; a flat there was given to Eisenhower for life in 1945.
A shop-lined bridge over the Avon at Bath, with three arches and Venetian windows over the water (1769–1774)
Bath, Somerset
Pulteney Bridge, one of very few bridges in the world with shops across its full span.
A London town house in Portman Square whose top-lit circular staircase is often called the finest domestic interior of the century (1775–1777)
Portman Square, London
Home House, built for Elizabeth, Countess of Home, the 'Queen of Hell'.
A riverside speculation of terraces on brick vaults beside the Thames, named from the Greek for brothers and demolished in 1936 (1768–1772)
Strand, London
The Adelphi — from Greek adelphoi, 'brothers' — which nearly bankrupted the Adam partnership and had to be disposed of by lottery.
Key ideas
- 'Movement': the rise and fall, advance and recess of a building's masses, to give the variety of a landscape painting
- The Romans decorated their private houses far more freely than their temples, so an architect need not be bound by temple rules
- A room is a total design — plasterwork, carpet, furniture, grate and handle all in one vocabulary
Quick-fire facts
- •Son of the Scottish architect William Adam; he worked with his brothers John, James and William
- •On his Grand Tour he studied with Charles-Louis Clérisseau and Piranesi, and in 1757 surveyed Diocletian's Palace at Split, publishing the results in 1764
- •Appointed Architect of the King's Works in 1761, resigning in 1768 when elected MP for Kinross-shire
- •With James he published The Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam from 1773, which spread the style across Europe and America
- •The Adelphi speculation of the 1770s nearly ruined the brothers and was finally unloaded by a state lottery
- •In Edinburgh he designed Charlotte Square, the Old College of the university, and General Register House
- •Horace Walpole called the Adam manner 'gingerbread and snippets of embroidery', and the style fell from fashion after his death
- •He was buried in Westminster Abbey; some 9,000 of his drawings were bought by John Soane and are in the Soane Museum
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Sources
- John Summerson — Architecture in Britain 1530–1830
- John Fleming — Robert Adam and His Circle