Robert Adam: Drawings and Imagination (Cambridge Studies in the History of Architecture)

This book attempts to explain how the great eighteenth-century architect Robert Adam went about the business of design. It therefore deals with Adam's drawings rather than the buildings themselves, and tries to show that these pen, wash and watercolour 'inventions', of which he was an acknowledged master, were the ideal vehicle for his architectural ideas. It was to this end that Robert and his brother James studied drawing and composition in the most advanced drawing schools of Rome. The Adam publication The Works of Architecture (1773) attempted an equation between drawing style, Robert Adam 'inventions' and the Picturesque, which dominated the last 20 years of the Adam practice. The Works itself is seen as a seminal book which obliquely supplied the theory for the Adam interpretation of the Picturesque in its various prefaces and the plates themselves. In all of this Adam was served by a carefully-organised office, itself virtually a drawing academy.