The Soane Museum Study Group is an open forum for scholars – both established and emerging – to present new research into an aspect of architectural history and/or Soane’s collection.
Anna McAlaney : A villa for the Revd William Rose: Robert Adam & Rose and Co.
The later work produced by the Adam office varied from the extensive country house projects so prevalent at the start of their career. Increasing unrest in Europe and the American Revolutionary Wars had created financial uncertainty in the London markets, which in turn limited the number of large-scale architectural commissions. This coincided with a burgeoning of the mercantile and professional classes, who wished to exhibit a knowledge of classical values that simultaneously celebrated their new found status as land owners. As a result the elegant villa of miniature proportions became increasingly a part of the Adam office canon.
Previously thought to have been unexecuted, the villa built for the Revd William Rose is an interesting example of these later commissions for small-scale country and suburban villas. Considering evidence of its construction and relevant comparative designs, alongside additional material which identifies the client as the son of the skilled plasterer, Joseph Rose the elder, this talk explores Robert and James Adam’s relationship with the firm Rose and Co., on whom the brothers relied almost exclusively to faithfully replicate their elegant interior designs.
Anna McAlaney is a trainee cataloguer of architectural drawings from the Adam Office collection held at Sir John Soane’s Museum. With an MA in Classical Archaeology, she specialised in the reception of eighteenth-century excavations in Italy, and their subsequent impact on British architecture and interior design.
Event Details
Tuesday 15 October 2019
18:00 drinks for 18:30 to 19:30 lecture
On arrival please come to No.14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The door will open at 18:00.
Image: Adam Office, Design for the front façade of Mr Rose’s house at Beckenham, 1788. SM Adam volume 35/101