November 2008

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Robert Adam is an architect who lends himself particularly well to photographic treatment as so much of his work is highly scenic, spatially exciting and full of movement as well as colour and exquisite detail. The great Ionic portico at Osterley, the Ante-Room at Syon, the sculpture gallery at Newby or the circular staircases at Home House and Culzean Castle all seem made for pictorial recording. They received their due from successive Country Life photographers in the 20th century. Adam’s reputation as one of England’s leading neo-classical architects owes much to Country Life, and especially to the pioneering articles by A.T. Bolton that began in 1913 and culminated in 1922 in his massive two-volume monograph, The Works of Robert and James Adam. Only Sir Edwin Lutyens among English architects has received so much attention from Country Life, hardly a year passing without an article on one or other of Adam’s buildings.

The present book is a selection from the large number of photographs of Adam’s work that is the product of that recording, and includes recent colour pictures for some of his major interiors as well as the classic black-and-white views, rich in light and shade and often exaggerated in scale, taken by Charles Latham, A. E. Henson and Arthur Gill in the years before and after World War i. Particularly breathtaking are the sublime views of the interior of Syon taken in 1919 ‘by the quite exceptional favour of the owners, the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland’, to accompany four articles on the house by A.T. Bolton. These pictures first brought this masterpiece – one of the finest interiors in Europe – to wider public notice, and established the defining image of Adam’s incomparably rich and varied sequences of rooms there.

There are just enough more recent colour photographs to provide an idea of the rich polychromy that played so large a part in Adam’s concept and, as he claimed himself, was a radical departure from the ubiquitous white, ‘stone’ and gilt of his English Palladian predecessors. However, as Eileen Harris remarks in her text, much of the modern ‘restoration’ of Adam’s colour schemes is far from accurate or scholarly, let alone subtle. Too much has been dependent on the great cache of 7,000 original Adam drawings preserved in the Soane Museum – which are of course draughtsmen’s ink and watercolour effects – rather than what was actually carried out, from the evidence of the rooms themselves. The Great Hall of Syon, for instance, which adorns the front cover, is picked out all over in myriad shades of cream and grey-blue, whereas Adam’s original treatment was all dead white.

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