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.”