Architect Robert Adam - Soane's Museum

Robert Adam's London was a landmark exhibition held at Sir John Soane's Museum, Lincoln's Inn Fields, running from 30 November 2016 to 11 March 2017. Curated by Dr. Frances Sands, Curator of Drawings and Books at the museum, it was notably the first time the Scottish architect's work across London as a whole had been examined in a London museum. Robert Adam had a long and enduring connection to London, establishing his practice there in 1758 and remaining in the city until he died in 1792, with a greater density of his work in the capital than anywhere else. The exhibition drew on Sir John Soane's remarkable archive of around 8,000 Adam drawings — purchased by Soane himself some 40 years after Adam's death — with 80% of all the last surviving drawings of Adam's work included in the show. The exhibition was organised around nine themes, spanning Robert Adam at Home, Public Buildings, Speculative Buildings, Commercial Buildings, New Townhouses, Royal Patrons, Female Patrons, and Interior Decoration, reflecting the remarkable breadth of his output. Adam designed everything from prisons to fabulous spaces for entertaining and some of the most expensive furniture ever made by Thomas Chippendale, and was prolific, producing designs for some 1,700 London-based projects on behalf of 350 patrons, including King George III. The exhibition examined projects that survive, such as the Admiralty Screen on Whitehall and monuments in Westminster Abbey, alongside grandiose and ambitious visions that were never built, offering a unique glimpse into how the capital's skyline might have looked today had all of Adam's innovative work become a reality.