Robert Adam was born on 3 July 1728 in Kirkcaldy, the second surviving son of William Adam, architect and business man, and his wife Mary Robertson. He was educated at the High School in Edinburgh and studied at the University there from 1743. In Edinburgh he became acquainted with some of the leading intellectual figures of the day including William Robertson who was Adam’s cousin, Adam Smith, also a native of Kirkcaldy, David Hume and Adam Ferguson with whom he struck up a particular friendship. He probably attended one of the local drawing schools while studying at the University which he left prematurely in 1745 or 1746 to join his father’s office as it was particularly pressed at that time.
William Adam died in 1748 and Robert and his elder brother John formed a partnership to carry on his architectural and contracting business. In the latter capacity the partnership constructed and reconstructed the series of Highland forts after the end of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, including Fort George, the Board of Ordnance being responsible for their design. As draughtsmen with the Board of Ordnance Paul and Thomas Sandby came to Scotland to record and map the installations. Paul Sandby’s Picturesque style of draughtsmanship clearly had an effect on the young Robert Adam. Fort George also provided Adam with a visual training in the details of military and by extension castle architecture. Alongside the military work the Adams were completing Hopetoun House, begun by William Adam in 1725.
The contracting side of the Adam business was profitable. By 1754 Robert had a capital of £5000 which enabled him to undertake a tour of Italy. Robert left Edinburgh in October 1754 on a modified version of the ‘Grand Tour’. In Brussels he joined the Hon. Charles Hope, younger brother of the Earl of Hopetoun, whose presence gave him immediate entry into aristocratic society wherever they went. The French architectural designer Charles-Louis Clérisseau was persuaded to join them in Florence. This was a coup as they thus acquired the services of a brilliant draughtsman with a penchant for the neo-classical. They arrived in Rome in February 1755 and under Clérisseau, Adam embarked on a programme of study and drawing from the antique. He attended drawing classes at Pompeo Batoni’s academy. He was also instructed in the composition of architectural scenery by Charles-Louis Lallemand and in architectural composition by Laurent-Benoit Dewez. Dewez’s influence continued beyond the Roman sojourn as he followed Adam to London in 1758. Also in the circle in which he moved in Rome was the engraver G B Piranesi who later dedicated a work to Robert Adam and who had an important effect on Adam’s vision of the past. During his time in Rome Adam and Clérisseau visited the ruins of Diocletian’s palace in Split, Dalmatia and completed Adam exploration and measurement of the palace in the space of five weeks. This was published in 1764.
Adam returned to England via the Rhineland in January 1757. His brother James made an Italian tour in 1760-63. Robert Adam established himself in a house in Lower Grosvenor Street with his collection of pictures and classical fragments. He was soon joined there by his sisters and two of his brothers, James and William. In Italy he had resolved to set up practice in London as he felt that Scotland was a ‘narrow place’ and England offered scope to become, as was his ambition, a leading architect in both countries. From this point onwards, Robert Adam became the prominent member of the family firm through his brilliance as a designer and through his ability for sheer hard work. At the same time William Adam provided business acumen and John Adam provided the capital from his estate at Blair Adam. The support of various fellow Scots in London was also significant – the Duke of Argyll and Lord Bute proved important patrons. Lord Bute secured for him the post of Architect of the King’s Works for Robert in 1761 (a post which he retained until 1769), the same year in which he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. He had been member of the Society of Arts from 1757. He obtained the post of Surveyor to the Chelsea hospital in 1765 and this he retained until his death.
During this period Adam changed the face of English domestic architecture. In place of Lord Burlington’s Palladianism with its strict adherence to the hierarchy of the orders, he introduced a new vocabulary which drew from a wide range of sources from antiquity to the Cinquecento. Initially he worked in what is described by Alan Tait as ‘rococo classicism’ in the 1760s but this soon gave way to a more obviously antique manner with stronger and bolder colours used in the interiors exemplified in interiors such as Derby House, London and Osterley Park Middlesex. The use of colour became an essential element in the ‘Adam style’ as much as interior detailing. His style was adopted to a greater or lesser extent almost immediately by architects and builders. Only Sir William Chambers remained unaffected and his disproval of Adam’s ‘affectations’ may be connected with the fact that Adam was never elected to the Royal Academy.
It was Adam’s approach to interior design that had the greatest impact. In planning terms he managed to arrange sequences of rooms with interesting shapes (as opposed to the earlier Georgian simple rectangular rooms. Every surface and every element were treated as part of the overall scheme which was highly sophisticated – from walls to carpets, ceilings to furniture. All sorts of neoclassical and Renaissance motifs, such as griffins, sphinxes, altars, urns and putti, were incorporated. Plasterwork ceilings, which often incorporated painted panels, were executed by Joseph Rose. Interior details were echoed on the exterior (where the commission allowed) in the form of delicate plasterwork, thus enabling coherence in his buildings.
Adam’s ingenuity in planning buildings is demonstrated by his remodelling of various town houses in London. In Derby House in Grosvenor Square, a town house in a terrace and constricted by the site, he succeeded in re-arranging the spaces and separating out rooms with private or public functions by combining the French concept of a succession of rooms with the traditional English circuit. Alan Tait notes that ‘there can be little doubt that Derby House and Wynn House and in the interiors of Home House (1773) set a new standard of brilliance, movement and informality’. By the 19th century his plans were described by C R Cockerell as a ‘labrinth’.
Adam’s country house practice was large and wide ranging with commissions in England, Scotland and Ireland. Many of his early commissions were for remodelling or adapting earlier houses – at Harewood and Kedleston for example. His grandest house of this time was Luton Hoo which was uncompromisingly neoclassical in design. The client for Luton Hoo was the Earl of Bute whose patronage and support for Adam was invaluable. Luton Hoo, however, was never completed and was partially destroyed and rebuilt in the 20th century. His design for Gosford House in East Lothian (now remodelled) is perhaps the best example by Adam of a large and original country house.
During this time Adam advertised himself through his publications, the volume on Diocletian’s Palace published in 1764 followed by the first volume ‘Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam’ which appeared between 1773 and 1778. Subsequent volumes appeared in 1779 and 1822, the latter after Adam’s death. In the first volume they claimed to have re-introduced ‘movement’ in architecture ‘the rise and fall, the advance and recess with other diversity of form in the different parts of the building’. The Adams expressed admiration for the work of Sir John Vanbrugh although deploring some of his ‘barbarisms’. The picturesque approach to design which developed in the mid-1770s was learned in part from Paul Sandby’s approach, known to Adam from their work on the Highland forts. Robert Adam’s copious sketches in pen and wash reveal his vision of the Romantic landscape. He began to experiment with the complex relationship between a building, its setting and a sense of history. An example of this is his design for the office court at Brampton Ryan in Herefordshire which he cast as an abandoned and decayed Roman camp. His work at Culzean and Seton also demonstrate his vision at this time and are much influenced by Sandby. Culzean on an isolated promontory site was designed as a ruinous castle using a mixture of classical and Gothic elements on the exterior and classical details in the interior. The views from the curving double staircase and round drawing room with views to the sea were fulfilled the Picturesque ideal.
The Adam practice was one of the busiest ones in England between the 1750s and the 1780s, despite the state of affairs in the country as a whole in the 1770s. His immense output was only made possible by the presence of a number of highly capable draughtsmen in the office. Of particular note are Laurent-Benoit Dewez had met Adam in Rome and later followed him to England but who left in 1759 and went on to become a leading architect in Belgium; George Richardson, also a Scot by birth, who had accompanied James Adam on the Grand Tour; the Italians Agostino Brunias, Joseph Bonomi, Giuseppe Manocchi and Antonio Zucchi. Manocchi and Zucchi were decorative artists and each had a specific influence of the Adam style. Manocchi who returned to Italy in 1773 thought he had been badly treated by the Adams. On the other hand George Richardson spoke kindly of his time in the office in one of his publications. The Adams had a firm grip on their employees. All the drawings were the property of the office and were signed as such.
Adam’s practice was certainly the most fashionable at the time. Despite this Adam was given very few opportunities for monumental design on a large scale. By the time he returned from Italy, many of the Whig aristocrats had already built their mansions and Adam’s role was simply to design their interiors. Only very rarely did Adam get the opportunity to design a whole building from scratch. Public commissions came late in his life – Cambridge and Edinburgh Universities and Register House in Edinburgh. The Cambridge scheme did not come to fruition while at Edinburgh University, the buildings were completed in a very different way from what he had intended. Only at Register House did he achieve something his ambition for a monumental building.
The Adelphi was initiated in part because of the ‘desire to raise a great building of a semi-public nature in the monumental manner’. The Adam brothers took 99 year lease of an extensive area on the north bank of the Thames where they intended to erect twenty-four houses, treated as a single architectural composition and raised on a terrace, the vaulted interior of which was intended to be let as warehouses. As a speculation it was dubious. David Hume wrote to Adam Smith in June 1772 : ‘the scheme of the Adelphi always appeared so imprudent, that my wonder is, how they cou’d have gone on so long’. The national credit crisis of 1772 led to the abandonment of the scheme and the near financial ruin of Adam.
The publication of ‘The Works in Architecture’ was in part a response to the relative failure of the Adelphi venture, begun 1768, and the adverse publicity it attracted. The brothers saved themselves from financial ruin in various ways. They failed to raise enough money by a loan on the security of the Blair Adam estate and by the sale of many works of art that they had brought back from Italy. However by holding a lottery in 1774 they disposed of the whole property of the Adelphi and they retrieved the situation. However it was thought that he used his position as Member of Parliament for Kinross-shire (1768-1774) for obtaining the act of Parliament promoting the lottery. In 1773 they had become involved in another town planning venture in Marylebone, though not this time as principals. The Adam proposal was for a series of detached villas along Portland Place. However the American War of Independence meant that the project as first envisaged was aborted. Instead of individual mansions, blocks of houses were built, again designed by the Adams. Each house was built as an individual speculation.
During the 1770s Adam began to acquire a reputation as a poor administrator and that he lacked sound financial judgement. His country house commissions often overran the budget – such as at Harewood and at Brasted in Kent where the agreed maximum was £5000 but the eventual cost £9500. His reputation was not enhanced by the lawsuit over stucco. The Adams acquired the patent for two stucco compositions from two different people, David Wark of Haddington and a Swiss clergyman called Liardet, and in 1776 obtained an Act of Parliament vesting in the patentees the exclusive right to manufacture what they called ‘Adam’s new invented patent stucco’. John Johnson produced a rival stucco claiming that it had been invented before that of Wark or Liardet. The Adams claimed Johnson had infringed their patent and initiated a lawsuit. Lord Mansfield was the judge in the case and found in favour of the Adams. As both client and fellow Scot he was thought to have been biased. The case attracted much publicity.
By 1780 James Wyatt had begun to eclipse Robert Adam in popularity. As a result the last ten years of Adam’s life were spent on jobs in Scotland where he obtained commissions for both public commissions, such as the urban developments in Glasgow and Edinburgh and country houses. There he continued to develop the picturesque castle style, a fusion of Gothic and classical elements, which characterised much of his later country house work.
Robert Adam died suddenly in Abermarle Street in London on 3 March 1792. He had been ill some time before with a ‘complaint in his stummach’ and it returned in early 1792. He was unmarried. He was buried in Westminster Abbey. Although the funeral was private, the pall bearers were a distinguished group of people: the Duke of Buccleuch, the Earl of Coventry, the Earl of Lauderdale, Viscount Stormont, Lord Frederick Campbell, and William Pulteney of Whitehall. James Adam’s death in 1794 meant the end of the firm, although William Adam did submit designs for the completion of the University of Edinburgh buildings. William went bankrupt in 1801 and in 1818 and 1821 sold the family belongings.
As a person Adam was a man of considerable charm and ability. His pall bearers testify to Adam’s patronage and friendship. Joseph Bonomi, Adam’s leading draughtsman, spoke well of him and his contemporaries compared him favourably with William Chambers.
The vast corpus of architectural drawings by the Adams was purchased by Sir John Soane and is now in the Soane Museum. There are other drawings in the V & A, the National Gallery of Scotland, and the RIBA. Some remain at Blair Adam and Penicuik House.