The Adam brothers’ own engravings of their buildings and interiors, ceilings, chimneypieces and furniture, with prefaces claiming a new lightness and variety in the ornament of rooms, drawn from the Roman houses and baths rather than from the temples, and a new “movement” in the composition of fronts.
Robert Adam (1728–1792) studied in Rome from 1754 to 1758 and measured Diocletian’s palace at Split. With his brother James he built up a practice in London from 1758 in which the decoration of rooms, their ceilings, walls, chimneypieces, carpets and furniture, was designed as a whole.
The Works appeared in parts from 1773, two volumes by 1779 and a third after their deaths. The plates of Syon, Kenwood, Luton and the London houses show the manner the book names: low relief, fine scale, the ceiling’s ornament answered by the carpet’s, and grounds of pale green, pink and blue.