Robert Adam
Robert Adam, (born July 3, 1728, Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scot.—died
March 3, 1792, London, Eng.), Scottish architect and
designer who, with his brother James (1730–94), transformed
Palladian Neoclassicism in England into the airy, light,
elegant style that bears their name. His major architectural
works include public buildings (especially in London), and
his designs were used for the interiors of such country
mansions as Syon House (1762–69) in Middlesex (now in
Hounslow, London).
Early life
Robert was the second son of William Adam, the foremost
Scottish architect of his time. William, who as master mason
to the Board of Ordnance in North Britain supervised the
design of military buildings, also designed numerous country
houses in a conservative Palladian style—the modified
classic Roman style that was originally developed by the
16th-century architect Andrea Palladio. The Adam children
grew up in the cultured atmosphere of a propertied and
well-connected 18th-century family. Shortly after Robert’s
birth the family moved to Edinburgh, where at the age of six
he entered the Edinburgh High School. In 1743 he enrolled at
Town’s College (now University of Edinburgh), but in 1745 he
abandoned his studies and the following year entered his
father’s office as an apprentice and assistant.
William Adam died in 1748, and his Board
of Ordnance post passed to his eldest son, John, who took
Robert into partnership. In the succeeding few years both
benefited from the lucrative contracts that resulted from
the appointment. Besides building Fort George in the Moray
Firth near Inverness, the Adam brothers also were engaged to
complete the interior of the earl of Hopetoun’s house. In
their interiors the brothers introduced into Scotland a new,
lighter, almost Rococo style of decoration. The other
important private commission of these years was Dumfries
House, Ayrshire, for the earl of Dumfries.
European influences
In 1754 Robert Adam, who by then considered himself to
be worth £5,000, was invited to accompany the Honourable
Charles Hope, the earl of Hopetoun’s younger brother, to
Italy. He thus had the opportunity to realize the dream he
had been saving for since his father’s death, and, just as
important, he had the social advantages of traveling with
the brother of an earl. He was as much concerned with
meeting young noblemen abroad as with acquiring more
architectural knowledge from a study of the monuments of
Roman antiquity. The letters he wrote to his family during
his years abroad show Adam to be a madly ambitious young
man, an arrogant social climber, and yet still a dedicated
artist.
He met Hope in Brussels, and they
proceeded to Paris, where Adam fitted himself out in the
latest fashions and set out to “lay in a stock of good
acquaintance that may be of use to me hereafter.” After
fewer than three weeks in Paris, they set off for Italy via
the south of France, visiting en route the ancient Roman
sites of Arles, Nîmes, the Pont du Gard, and Montpellier.
They reached Genoa early in January 1755 and proceeded to
Florence via Livorno. Arriving at the end of the month, they
were immediately caught up in the social whirl for which
Adam had hoped.
While in Florence, Adam met a man who was
to have an important professional influence upon him. This
was the talented young French architect and draftsman
Charles-Louis Clérisseau, who agreed to accompany him as
instructor and draftsman on the tour. Clérisseau had been a
student at the French Academy in Rome, but he left in 1754
after a dispute with its director. As a result of his
friendship with Clérisseau, Adam came into contact with
avant-garde architectural theory in Rome. He wrote:
I hope to have my ideas greatly enlarged
and my taste formed upon the solid foundation of genuine
antiquity.
Clérisseau agreed to
serve [him] as an antiquarian…teach [him]
perspective and drawing…[and] give [him] copies of all
[Clérisseau’s] studies of the antique, bas-reliefs and other
ornaments.
Adam left Florence in February 1755 and traveled to Rome,
where he had to choose whether to devote himself to elegant
society or to architecture:
If I am known in Rome to be an architect,
if I am seen drawing or with a pencil in my hand, I cannot
enter into genteel company who will not admit an artist or,
if they do admit him, will very probably rub affronts on him
in order to prevent his appearing at their card-playing,
balls and concerts.
He had to decide:
Shall I lose Hope and my introduction to
the great, or shall I lose Clérisseau and my taste for the
grand?
He quarreled with Hope, and the two separated. Taking rooms
for himself and Clérisseau, Adam settled down to serious
study, visiting, sketching, and measuring the monuments of
antiquity. Among the important figures he met in Rome were
the art collector Cardinal Giuseppe Albani and the engraver
Giambattista Piranesi, who dedicated to him his plan of
ancient Rome in his book Il Campo Marzio (1762), which
contained an engraved portrait of Adam.
In May 1757 Adam and Clérisseau left Rome
and traveled to Dalmatia via Venice to visit the ruins of
Diocletian’s palace at Spalato (modern Split, Croatia). Adam
felt he
could not help considering my knowledge of
Architecture as imperfect, unless I should be able to add
the observation of a private edifice of the Ancients to my
study of their public works.
They spent five weeks at Spalato, preparing the drawings
that were to be published in 1764 as Ruins of the Palace of
the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia.
The Adam style
Having nearly exhausted his money and anxious to return
to England, Adam had to forgo the pleasures of further
expeditions to Greece and Egypt. He returned to London in
January 1758, his head full of details of Roman antiquities.
Palladianism was losing its appeal, and the public was ready
for a new architectural style. Adam lost no time in making
his reputation, and by the mid-1760s he had, with the help
of his younger brother James, who joined him in London in
1763, created and fully developed the Adam style. They later
claimed that it “brought about, in this country…a kind of
revolution in the whole system of this useful and elegant
art.” The Adam style was marked by a new lightness and
freedom in the use of the classical elements of
architecture—a fresh combination of many architectural
elements. In the Royal Society of Arts building (1772–74),
for instance, Adam placed Ionic capitals below a Doric
triglyph frieze, a liberty a Palladian would never have
dared take. The various influences included the Palladianism
of Richard Boyle, 3rd earl of Burlington, and William Kent,
both architects; the movement and vigour of the architecture
of Sir John Vanbrugh; contemporary French work, discernible
particularly in details, planning, and furniture design;
Roman archaeology; and Italian Renaissance decoration,
particularly the fanciful ornamentation of the 16th century.
Adam’s genius lay in his synthesis of these various lines of
development. The Adam style was essentially a decorative
style, and it is as a designer of interiors that Adam is
chiefly remembered. He gave meticulous attention to every
part of each room, from the carpets to the most unobtrusive
decoration.
Adam’s first important work in London was
the Admiralty Screen (c. 1760). Through the influence of
John Stuart, 3rd earl of Bute, a friend of King George III,
he was appointed architect of the King’s Works in November
1761 along with William Chambers, his principal
architectural rival. By the early 1760s he had many domestic
commissions; almost without exception these consisted of the
completion or redecoration of earlier houses. It was ironic
that, despite his fame and ability, Adam was rarely called
upon to build completely new houses, nor was he to realize
his grandiose ideas for public buildings until the very end
of his life.
The first Adam interiors at Hatchlands
(1758–61), Surrey, and Shardeloes (1759–61),
Buckinghamshire, were still near-Palladian, but by 1761 his
mature style was developing. Commissions from this time
include Harewood House, Yorkshire; Croome Court,
Worcestershire; Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire; Bowood House,
Wiltshire; and Osterley Park, Middlesex (now in Hounslow,
London).
In 1762 he was employed to redesign the
interior of Syon House. Adam produced an important plan that
proposed filling an old centre court with a vast, domed,
pantheon-like hall; it was not executed, however. The
entrance hall of Syon, based on a basilica—a rectangular
building divided into three areas by two rows of
columns—with its half-domed ends, is one of the most
significant Neoclassical interiors in England. Other houses
from this early phase include Adam’s first completely new
house, Mersham-le-Hatch (1762–72), Kent; Lansdowne House
(1762–68), Berkeley Square, London; Luton Hoo (1766–74),
Bedfordshire; Newby Hall (c. 1767–80), Yorkshire; and
Kenwood House (1767–68), Hampstead (now in Camden), London.
The south front of Kedleston Hall
(1757–59) provides an example of Adam’s exterior treatment.
His theme of a triumphal arch as the exterior expression of
the domed interior hall is the first use of this particular
Roman form in domestic architecture. The double portico (an
open space created by a roof held up by columns) at Osterley
Park, derived from the Portico of Octavia, Rome, is a
similar Neoclassical motif.
In 1768 Robert and James Adam leased a
site on the River Thames for a speculative development to be
known as the Adelphi (it was almost totally destroyed in
1936). They invested a large sum on embanking the site and
building several terraces of houses (1768–72) in which the
Adam interior style of slim pilasters supporting a shallow
frieze and cornice—the middle and uppermost sections of an
entablature—was brought outdoors. It was, however, a
financial disaster. In 1773 they again speculated
unsuccessfully in a group of stuccoed terraces in Portland
Place, London.
The Adams built three major London houses
in the 1770s, which were superb examples of their mature
style—Wynn House (1772–74), No. 20, St. James’s Square, for
Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn; Home House (1775–77), No. 20,
Portman Square, for the countess of Home (the original site
of the Courtauld Institute of Art [see Courtauld Institute
Galleries]); and Derby House (1773–74; demolished 1862) in
Grosvenor Square for the 12th earl of Derby.
In 1773–79 they published The Works in
Architecture of Robert and James Adam in two volumes. A
third was published posthumously in 1822. In the preface to
the first volume they explain their idea of “movement,” an
essential aspect of the Adam style:
Movement is meant to express, the rise and
fall, the advance and recess, with other diversity of form,
in the different parts of a building, so as to add greatly
to the picturesque of the composition.
By 1780 Robert Adam’s popularity was beginning to decline,
and Horace Walpole, after visiting the architect Henry
Holland’s new Carlton House, wrote, “How sick one shall be,
after this chaste palace, of Mr. Adam’s gingerbread and
sippets of embroidery.”
Furniture design
As a designer of furniture, too, Adam played a leading
role and was prolific, turning his hand to everything from
organ cases and sedan chairs to saltcellars and door
fittings. The furniture style he evolved, popularized by the
cabinetmaker George Hepplewhite, was always meant to
harmonize with the rest of the home. It is one of the
outstanding features of an Adam interior that everything,
even the smallest detail, was part of the unified scheme
created by the architect.
Later works
Robert Adam designed and built a number of romantic
neo-Gothic castles, mostly dating from the 1780s, in
Scotland. The most important of these is Culzean (1777–92),
Ayrshire, for the earls of Cassilis. Another neo-Gothic work
is the interior of Alnwick Castle (c. 1770–80; destroyed in
the 19th century), Northumberland.
Toward the end of his life, Adam built the
Register House (1772–92), Edinburgh, in which he realized
the conception of a monumental domed hall within a square,
envisaged at Syon some years earlier. In 1789 he designed
the University of Edinburgh, whose entrance front is perhaps
his most successful exterior. At Fitzroy Square (1790–94),
London, and Charlotte Square (1791–1807), Edinburgh, he
experimented for the last time with the introduction of
movement into street architecture.
Adam was buried in Westminster Abbey. The
bulk of the nearly 9,000 drawings he left were purchased by
the architect Sir John Soane in 1833 and are in Sir John
Soane’s Museum, London.
Sandra Millikin
Encyclopædia Britannica
