Robert and James Adam

British architects

• James Adam
• Born: July 21, 1732
• Birthplace: Edinburgh, Scotland
• Died: October 20, 1794
• Place of death: London, England

• Robert Adam
• Born: July 3, 1728
• Birthplace: Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland
• Died: March 3, 1792
• Place of death: London, England

Robert Adam, one of the greatest British architects, created a new approach to building design in the eighteenth century, which linked the architecture and the interior design of his buildings into a single design scheme, now called the neoclassical style. His new style of decorative design was named for him. His brother James contributed to the Adam enterprise as a close family associate and business partner, and to a lesser degree as an architect and designer on his own merit.

Early Lives

Robert and James Adam grew up as members of a close-knit family of four boys and six girls in Edinburgh, and as part of a large, accomplished, and distinguished extended family. Their father, William Adam, was Scotland’s leading architect by 1730, known particularly for his grand design and construction of Hopetoun House, one of Scotland’s largest and finest eighteenth century houses. Along with their early education at Edinburgh High School, the boys received an in-house apprenticeship in building from their father, a man of great energy and skill. Some of the boys’ friends included Adam Smith, David Hume, and James Hutton, who, with Robert and others, were the core of the brilliant Scottish Enlightenment.

The brothers attended the University of Edinburgh. The Stuart rebellion led by Charles Edward (Bonnie Prince Charlie) in 1745 disrupted their formal education; after these troubles, Robert began to work for his father full-time, and James eventually joined them. Robert, together with his older brother John, also an architect, learned much of his basic building craft from work, especially at Fort George, to improve Scottish military defenses. Consequently, when William Adam died in 1748, John, Robert, and later James were well prepared to take over his thriving architectural firm.

Robert had extraordinary talent and ambition, and as he worked and learned, he also saved for a Grand Tour of Europe, a virtual necessity, he had decided. The opportunity came in 1754 at the invitation of Charles Hope, younger brother of the earl of Hopetoun. Robert had saved œ5,000 by then, and, with family urging, he agreed.

Robert exuded great energy and seriousness of purpose, particularly about antiquities and architecture, yet he was a charming, delightful young Scotsman. He loved to sing and dance, although as a canny Scot, he assiduously avoided the opportunities to gamble available on the Continent. He was assertive, was hard-headed, loved comfort, and was a social climber. His few portraits show him to be fair, with a long and rather prominent nose, a slightly recessive mouth and strong chin, and dominant, lively eyes; he was a handsome man with a well-proportioned body.

James’s portraits show him perhaps taller, slim, with long hands and fingers, a long nose, a prominent mouth, and a somewhat receding chin. He, too, presented a pleasing countenance. James, however, was not ambitious, seldom completing plans or fulfilling his intentions, and he could be expensively self-indulgent. To some he was arrogant, highly critical, and flippant. He loved hobnobbing with the wealthy. Generally, James was a charming, likable fellow with enough art and building experience to give him an air of authority.

Neither Adam married. In Robert’s case, his work dominated all, leaving little time for family life. After the father died, the Adam family remained a close, devoted unit: After Robert set up his office in London, James, their younger brother William, and their sisters Janet and Elizabeth joined him. The sisters managed their brothers’ household affairs. John, as heir to his father’s property, remained in Edinburgh.

Lives’ Work

The Grand Tour upon which Robert Adam embarked in the autumn of 1754 profoundly changed his life. His four years abroad gave him confidence as well as the expertise that would serve his ambitious nature. The moneyed circles in Great Britain traditionally looked upon those in the arts as rather lowly craftsmen, not as professionals of independent standing. Robert, however, insisted upon going with Charles Hope as an equal, paying his own way and expecting the same treatment as the aristocrat. As a result, he was invited to social affairs that he might not otherwise have had the opportunity to attend. Aside from his genuine enjoyment on these occasions, he learned how to make himself and his ideas attractive to the aristocracy. In Rome he met many of the British nobility; when he returned to London to open a firm, he had no shortage of affluent clients.

Robert had the good luck to meet in Florence Charles-Louis Clérisseau, a teacher of architecture and an artist skilled at drawing and sketching Roman ruins. Immediately, Robert hired the Frenchman to teach him those skills that he lacked and knew he must have. Through Clérisseau, he met another teacher, Laurent Pěcheux, a painter and skilled draftsman. Ultimately, he became friends with the greatest Italian draftsman and engraver of the century, Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Piranesi recognized Adam’s talent and his enthrallment with all aspects of classical Roman art. With Clérisseau and occasionally Pěcheux, and sometimes alone with Piranesi, Robert devoted more than three years to sketching, studying, and measuring—learning all that he might about antique Roman art. Impelled by his will to be the best, the young student perfected his artistry, acquired a comfortable familiarity with the French and Italian languages, gathered precise measurements of ancient Rome’s great buildings, and fixed his mastery of Rome’s decorative arts. He returned to London armed with hundreds of sketches, which he later used as sources for his work there. He also carried home drawings of Roman emperor Diocletian’s palace, which he published in 1764 with great success.

James, too, went on a Grand Tour, from 1760 to 1763, and although it had less effect on him, he nevertheless returned to England with extensive experience in the fine arts, which made him an important partner in the London firm and a creditable architect himself. While abroad, James had also employed Clérisseau as a guide and teacher and had also received a warm reception from Piranesi. James’s shallowness, however, and his penchant for enjoying himself above all else, foredoomed him to a less distinguished career than that of his brother: He never achieved Robert’s command of the history of Roman art although he made many visits to churches, great houses, and palaces to see their paintings and objects of art and, along with Robert, returned to England with many artifacts and artworks.

Until Robert Adam changed it, the dominant architectural style in Great Britain had been Palladian, a style named for the sixteenth century Italian architect Andrea Palladio and based upon his study of ancient Roman architecture. His rural villas inspired the English with their strict symmetry, dramatized by a central block, perhaps domed, a portico front set high on a rusticated base, and wide steps sweeping up to the entry. If the building had wings, they were a matching pair. Above the base the stone was smooth. Aside from the columns and pediment of the entry porch, plain, evenly balanced windows gave the facade its decoration. Inside, the rooms were harmoniously proportioned and placed.

Early eighteenth century British architects revived Palladio’s style and applied it with sometimes stunning success to the spate of country houses then being built with Great Britain’s new wealth. By the 1760’s, however, the clear simplicity and drama of Palladianism were overburdened with elaborations and decorative mistakes. Enter Robert Adam, with his knowledge and determination to design according to the purest standards of ancient Rome, alone.

Once installed in London in 1758, Robert got important commissions, particularly a highly visible and successful gate and screen before the Admiralty in London. A major work followed with Kedleston House in Derbyshire. There, his modifications to plans and construction already in progress produced an Adam tour de force. On the exterior he adapted a Roman triumphal arch for the design of the garden front. Inside, his plan presented visitors with dramatic surprises, as they progressively moved up steps to the entry, the vestibule, the hall, the saloon—surprises achieved principally by altering shapes of the rooms and also through the Roman character of his interior design.

At Syon House, near London, the owners asked Adam to design a suite of rooms in an old nunnery. Under severe constraint from the old construction, he became architect of the interior and produced a series of variously shaped and decorated rooms. Robert also received commissions to build two major houses, Lansdowne House in London and Luton Hoo in Bedfordshire. Their grand design magnified the Adam renown. Meanwhile, at Osterly Park near London, Robert remade an Elizabethan house into a stunning eighteenth century country house with interiors showing the extraordinary talent of the Adam firm. By late 1763, James had returned from Italy to join him on these projects.

The Adam style was now apparent. The exteriors of Adam houses, with variations, were simple and balanced, the art of the design coming from repetition of light, flowing detail. Exterior columns were smooth, freestanding, and structurally necessary, and windows plain or with unaffected ornament. The Adams set their houses low, when possible, frequently with the foundation only slightly evident, giving the entrance approach a welcome openness and quiet dignity. Ancient Rome was the source for the design.

The opulence was inside, in the beauty and richness of the materials used and in their bold and unexpected design. The Adams restrained the opulence with a relatively simple, repetitive, and increasingly light pattern of decoration. In place of ubiquitous Palladian white, they returned color to the rooms, but within limits: very pale green and sage green, oyster white, cream, warm pink, and frequently green and pink in the same design. They used gilt, but not lavishly, and strong colors such as cerulean and ultramarine blue, purple, deep red, and burnt sienna, but sparingly and principally for contrast. Accents such as ceramic plaques and painted genre scenes set in ovals, squares, and rounds were strong but quiet. The rooms themselves varied from square to circular, rectangular, oval, cubed, some with niches, others without, many with semicircular apses, perhaps half-domed, perhaps set off by a screen of paired columns. The Adams were endlessly inventive. The results were graceful, charming, a new style.

In London, the brothers also designed important town houses, complete with stables and coaches but within narrow property restrictions. Here the challenge was to squeeze in sizable, interesting rooms without apparent strain. Robert’s brilliant grasp of space and proportion and his willingness to tamper with architectural verities showed themselves especially—with the Williams-Wynn House, the Derby House, and the Home House. Later he designed terraces of town houses for Fitzroy Square in London and Charlotte Square in Edinburgh.

The brothers nearly met their financial nemesis with the novel and ambitious Adelphi scheme, which boldly projected a long row of town houses atop wharves and storage halls on the banks of the Thames River. The Adelphi was built but was a financial disaster, perhaps as a result of poor financial management by James and William that not even brother John could restore.

Commissions continued to flow, however, especially castles in northern England. Robert explained the anomaly of a Roman purist building a medieval castle by pointing out that the refined classical designs of southern England would be overwhelmed by the wild nature of the northern landscape. The interiors of his assertive castles, at Wedderburn, Mellerstain, and Culzean, however, were pure Adam. James, on his own, designed a Riding School building in Edinburgh and a judicial court building in Hertford.

The Adams participated in Edinburgh’s booming expansion of the 1760’s, particularly with their imposing Register House, a huge government building, though not completed to their plans. Robert was asked to design a new building for the University of Edinburgh. His plan was a masterpiece of controlled surprise and restrained elegance, but only the entry wing was built as planned, and it, too, was spoiled by nineteenth century modifications. He and James died before the enterprise was fully established. Indeed, in Scotland, John died only months after Robert, and sadly the firm collapsed in bankruptcy in 1801.

Significance

Robert and James Adam published their three-volume The Works in Architecture starting in 1773. Its plates showed the facades, floor plans, and detailed ornament of their style. Although, in the preface, the Adams overstate their claim to “a kind of revolution” in architecture, within the context of the eighteenth century they did not exaggerate by much. Whether it be in the fine details of their design or in the architecture—particularly the room arrangement of their buildings—they produced startling new designs and a new conception of what an architect should do.

Their architecture relied upon a pleasing arrangement of volumes of mostly unadorned structural blocks held together by harmonious proportions and the design motifs of ancient Rome. The Adams were propagators of what is now called the neoclassical style, a style based on the simple purity and beauty of ancient Greek and Roman art, and about Rome the Adams were experts. The brothers are also significant in that they stressed movement in their architectural facades. Using a number of slight variations on the surface plane of their structures, they made those surfaces livelier and more variable to the eye. They extended their architecture to the interiors of their buildings, creating ingeniously shaped rooms while maintaining ideal geometrical proportion.

The Adams went further, insisting they be responsible for the entire room design. Their firm employed renowned plasterers, such as Joseph Rose, and the excellent painter Antonio Zucchi; they designed the furniture and employed craftsmen to make it, among them Thomas Chippendale and Matthew Boulton. The fabric, drapery, chandeliers, wine-coolers, inkstands, keyhole covers—they oversaw all. To this integrity they brought their own remarkable sense of style, so that nearly all of their designs were aesthetically successful. Their new Etruscan-style rooms (Greek, in fact) were immensely popular, and their tapestry rooms, with tapestries from ceiling to floor designed for that room alone, received similar praise.

The Adams brought elegance to architecture and design, the mark of neoclassical art. The simple, flowing quality of their designs, their inventiveness, and their refusal to allow decoration to obscure basic design were characteristics that set their work apart from that of their British and continental contemporaries.

Bibliography

Beard, Geoffrey. The Work of Robert Adam. Edinburgh: John Bartholomew and Son, 1978. A good general overview of Robert’s life and work, from architecture to door furniture. Extensive illustrations, many in color, of what survives.

Fleming, John. Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh and Rome. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962. An excellent study, beautifully written, of Robert’s early life in Scotland, his Grand Tour, and his first two years in London (to 1760). Fleming’s impressive scholarship embraces young James as well. Illustrated in part with Robert’s drawings and based upon extensive correspondence between Robert and his family.

Harris, Eileen. The Genius of Robert Adam: His Interiors. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001. Each chapter describes Adam’s interior designs for a specific project.

King, David N. The Complete Works of Robert and James Adam: Built and Unbuilt. 2d ed. New York: Architectural Press, 2001. A comprehensive overview of the works of both architects, including plans for unbuilt structures. Many illustrations, maps, and indices of people and places.

Rowan, Alistair. Designs for Castles and Country Villas by Robert and James Adam. Oxford, England: Phaidon Press, 1985. Rowan has assembled forty-seven architectural designs, of which sixteen were built, for a book he believes the Adams had intended to publish.

Rykwert, Joseph, and Anne Rykwert. The Brothers Adam: The Men and the Style. London: Collins, 1985. The Rykwerts analyze the brothers, their architecture, and their interior design with authority. The book is fresh, scholarly, and essential for study of the Adams. Includes an excellent bibliography.

Stillman, Damie. The Decorative Work of Robert Adam. New York: Transatlantic Arts, 1966. A close study with 173 illustrations, each accompanied by authoritative commentary. (For an excellent background on the decorative art of plasterwork, see Geoffrey Beard, Decorative Plasterwork in Great Britain, 1975.)

Summerson, Sir John N. Architecture in Britain, 1530 to 1830. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1977. This great architectural historian analyzes the Adam style and the Adam achievement with authority.

Yarwood, Doreen. Robert Adam. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970. An enjoyable appreciation of Robert and his successes, written for the general reader.