How England failed to grasp the genius of a Scottish architect family

So long as Scotland remained independent, the styles of European allies had been the most important outside influence on architecture, from French palatial to Dutch domestic. An English takeover was on the cards after 1707, but it never quite came about. Instead, and soon afterwards, Scottish architecture set off on a new path to a classicism of its own. It persists to the present day, after surviving powerful alternatives.

Often in Scotland, the triumph of novelty had modest and obscure origins, just as something out of the building trades. The Adam style, which rose to dominate taste in the 18th century, was scarcely present in the 17th century.

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Its emergence raised one man, William Adam of Kirkcaldy, from being a jobbing builder to a rich man serving the landowners of a new political and economic order. The Adam family itself joined this class and settled on the estate of Blair Adam in Fife.

A younger William was able to go to the University of Edinburgh, and there enrich his practical training from his father’s library assembled at Blair Adam. Apart from the conventional histories and classical texts, there was a working collection of illustrated architectural books in English, French and Italian, and a series of manuals on draughtsmanship.

After William’s death in 1748, two sons, Robert and John, went into partnership. Their earliest earnings were lucrative but humdrum. They built and rebuilt Highland forts destroyed or wrecked in the Jacobite rising of 1745. These projects brought to Scotland a team of official draughtsmen from the military Board of Ordnance in London, who dealt with Fort William and Fort Augustus.

Robert Adam

The Adam family were now royal master masons and contractors for the more ambitious Fort George outside Inverness. Their aesthetic education was in this way balanced by more practical experience, where drawings were swiftly turned into masonry and joinery.

This was the culmination of a military tradition stretching back to antiquity and offered the younger sons of Adam a visual overview of the history of forms and functionalism.

It gave them also an insight into the origins and survival of such archaic forms as the battlement and turret and the adaptability of others, such as the fosse, which had evolved into the ha-ha of garden architecture. Consciousness of the tradition appeared in the small pen drawings made around 1752, probably at Fort George.

The conservative cast of these designs fits well with the major architectural work undertaken by the brothers Adam at Hopetoun House outside Edinburgh, where they continued to work in the style introduced by their father when he gained the commission in 1725.

The next evolution of the Adam style came when Robert Adam went to Rome. He took lessons in one of the Roman drawing academies, that of Pompeo Batoni, a portrait painter with a large British clientele.

In following such an individualistic training – more that of the talented dilettante than the professional artist – both Robert and James were careful to be seen as amateurs who collected, saw the sights and took professional drawing lessons, rather than as hard men aiming to become rivals.

Robert wrote candidly to his family in Scotland how certain he was that “my being an artist if I am discovered to be such may do me hurt”. Such dilettantism was re-inforced in his tour to Naples in 1755. Each day, Robert produced at least three acceptable views, often of the same scene, despite the hot and humid weather.

The composition of architectural scenery by Robert went by imitation and variation. Right through his Roman period he copied and collected crumbling terraces and overgrown gardens, often filled with fragments of antiquity.

His purpose was deadly serious: to master the classical orders and their details. He sought a third and even more inventive idiom in copying the staircases of Piranesi, many of which miraculously reappear in the staircases of Scottish country houses or of the New Town of Edinburgh.

During these years, Robert Adam succeeded in transforming himself from a provincial and rather green Scottish architect into a cosmopolitan figure.

There was no question of a return to the Scottish practice of John Adam in Edinburgh and Robert settled down in London, arranging around himself the collection of pictures and antique fragments that advertised his taste and judgment – and through them the Adam style.

The practice was housed in the west end of London and remained there until its removal in 1772 to the main Adam development beside the River Thames, the Adelphi.

Other members of the Adam family or their apprentices, arrived from Rome. Post-Roman styles developed; for example, the rococo classicism of the early 1760s that quickly gave way to a more complex and obviously antique manner as Adam’s draughtsmen adapted to a lucrative new market.

Enthusiasm for colour elevated it to an essential element in the Adam interior, where it assumed a role as vital as that of the pilaster or cornice. The fusion of such elements was continued on the exterior of his buildings, where the delicate relief sculpture echoed the interior.

As the geography of the style spread to the English provinces – at Harewood House, Yorkshire, or Kenwood House, Hampstead – Adam managed by this continuity of decoration to bind together buildings where his contribution was not the only one.

This hallmark of Adam became one of the major targets of critics of the brothers’ work. In other words, strict repetition was demanded rather than development of the style. That remained, however, mainly a foible of English imitators, and in Scotland it was not regarded as a failing of the style that its colour schemes showed continuity from the furniture to the internal walls to the external walls.

The interpretation of Adam as a sort of flawed genius remained for most of the 19th century and was the usual English judgment of what Scots regarded as genius. One critic claimed his work could be corrected by “paring away his redundancies and omitting his superfluities”.

The best fate for the Adam style was to remain popular. Luckily, in the world beyond England, this was what happened.