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Neoclassicism in Britain:
the Adam brothers and ‘Athenian’ Stuart

RALPH HARRINGTON

The mid-eighteenth century was a period of flux and change for British architecture.
From the early years of the century, Palladianism had been dominant, extolled as the
perfect, universal architectural style; but the years from 1740 to 1760, a period of
instability in politics, aesthetics, and ideas, also saw dynamic change and
experimentation in architecture. The ‘static regularity and perfection’ which had
underlain the arts of the Augustan age began to produce in reaction ‘a renascence of
imagination and perceptiveness stimulating natural philosophy and romanticism’. 1
This was an age when Britain was open to new architectural influences from a wide
variety of sources; interior decoration and ornament came infected with the spirit of
the continental rococo, and enthusiasm for exotic and revived antique styles –
Chinese, Gothic, Tudor – underlined the accepted standards of classicism with a new
spirit of eclecticism and experiment. It was against this background that James
‘Athenian’ Stuart (1713-1788) and the Adam brothers, most prominently Robert
Adam (1728-1792), developed their interpretations of classical architecture and
decoration.
The degree of success achieved by Adam and Stuart in disseminating their
particular styles during their careers differed greatly. Adam was productive,
fashionable and influential, while Stuart’s productiveness was very limited and he
remained a comparatively minor figure in contemporary architecture: ‘as an architect,
Stuart failed to make the most of his opportunities … The success of the brothers
Adam in popularising their architectural innovations is the measure of [Stuart’s]
failure to do the same’.2 As will be discussed below, the sharply different characters
of Stuart and Adam were of considerable importance in shaping their respective

1 Christopher Hussey, English Country Houses: Early Georgian, 1715-1760 (London: Country Life,
1955; rev. edn. 1965), p. 26.
2 Howard Colvin, Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600-1840 (London: John Murray, 1978),
p. 795.

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careers; but the nature of the styles of architecture each expounded, and the
relationships of those styles to the contemporary background, were also vital factors.
For both James Stuart and Robert Adam, the investigation of surviving ancient
architecture was the foundation of their work. Stuart became involved in a scheme to
survey and record the surviving monuments of ancient Greece after meeting
Nicholas Revett and other English travellers in Italy, and becoming associated with
the Society of Dilettante. A proposal describing the project was issued in 1748, and
Stuart travelled with Revett to Greece in 1751 to begin the survey, returning to
England in 1755. Robert Adam, at about the same time, was in Italy on his Grand
Tour; in 1757 he surveyed the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Split in Dalmatia,
returning to London in 1758. The discoveries of contemporary archaeology were an
influence of increasing importance on the architecture of the period, and both James
Stuart and Robert Adam, with a store of new ideas based on the surviving
architecture of the ancient world at a time when new ideas were in demand, had the
potential to exert considerable influence on the architectural taste of their age.
The Adam style, as it developed over the course of the late eighteenth century,
made sophisticated use of motifs and patterns from a wide range of sources,
combining the fruits of recent archaeological investigations with decoration from
renaissance, baroque and contemporary styles. The discovery, particularly at Pompeii
and Herculaneum, of the circumstances of ancient Roman domestic architecture,
decoration and artefacts was of particular importance to the Adams in creating a
complex and highly adaptable scheme of integrated interior decoration and furniture
design of a specifically domestic classical character. The Adams were severely criticised
by some for their ‘gingerbread and sippets of embroidery’ (Horace Walpole) and
‘filigrane toy work’ (William Chambers),3 but the success of their style was
widespread and immediate.
James Stuart’s work proceeded at an altogether slower pace. The proposal for
their publication of The Antiquties of Athens had initially raised a great deal of interest,
but the schedule for the project had been overly optimistic, and the ultimate
realisation of the scheme failed to fulfil expectations, blunting the impact of Stuart’s
ideas. The length of time the work to appear reduced interest: volume I did not
appear until 1762, seven years after the authors’ return to London, and in failing to
cover any of the great monuments of Athens, being restricted instead to minor

3 Horace Walpole, letter to the Countess of Ossory, 17 September 1785, in Letters Addressed to the
Countess of Ossory, From the Year 1769 to 1797 (2nd edn., 2 vols., London: Richard Bentley, 1848),
vol. 2, p. 246 (often misquoted as ‘snippets’); William Chambers, A Treatise on the Decorative Part of
Civil Architecture (London: Priestley & Weale, 1825), vol. 2, p. 392.

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buildings, gravely disappointed many subscribers. Subsequent volumes were even

slower in appearing; volume II, which did include the Parthenon, was not published
until 1789, while volumes III to V were not finally all available until 1830, forty-two
years after Stuart’s death. Furthermore, the subscribers to the Antiquities were
gentlemen, patrons and collectors rather than builders, decorators and architects.
Whereas the Adam style became ‘the common property of a London builder’, 4 the
impact of Stuart’s work on the architectural and building trades was limited and
indirect.
However, there was no doubting the novelty and importance of Stuart’s work,
which, in laying the foundations for the Greek Revival, broke the domination of the
Roman architectural idea in Britain and brought British architectural thinking
gradually the same sphere of neoclassicism as much important work on the
continent. In France, the discovery of ancient Greece was an established part of the
neoclassical ideal: Laugier wrote in 1753 that ‘architecture owes all that is perfect in it
to the Greeks’, and that the Romans were capable merely of ‘admiring, and …
copying the most excellent models that the Greeks helped them to’. 5 In Britain, this
was a new and controversial idea when echoed nine years later by Stuart and Revett
in the preface to the Antiquities of Athens:

… as Greece was the great Mistress of the Arts, and Rome, in this
respect, no more than her disciple, it may be presumed, all the
most admired Buildings which adorned that Imperial City were but
imitations of Grecian originals. … It seemed therefore evident that
Greece is the Place where the most beautiful Edifices were erected,
and where the purest and most elegant Examples of ancient
Architecture are to be discovered.6

Through this bold claim for the superiority of Greece over Rome, Stuart seeks to
place his work in a purer, clearer stream of neoclassicism than the Adam brothers'
sophisticated synthesis of Rome, the Levant and the renaissance. Stuart and the
Adams are akin, however, in their nascent romanticism. Rather than echoing the

4 Colvin, Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, p. 47.

5 M.-A. Laugier, Essai sur l’Architecture (Paris, 1753), pp. 3-4 (‘L’Architecture doit ce qu’elle a de plus
parfait aux Grecs, Nation Privilégiée, à qui il étoit réservé de ne rien ignorer dans les Sciences, &
de tout inventer dans les Arts. Les Romains dignes d’admirer; capables de copier les modéles
excellens que le Gréce leur fournissoit’).
6 James Stuart & Nicholas Revett, The Antiquities of Athens: Measured and Delineated by James Stuart
F.R.S. and F.S.A. and Nicholas Revett Painters and Architects (London, 1762), vol. I, preface, pp. i, v.

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intellectual, rational neoclassicism of France, neoclassicism in Britain became

associated with ideas of the sublime and the picturesque. This spirit can be seen in
Robert Adam’s concern to infuse his work with a sense of ‘movement’, and is
present to a far more significant degree in Stuart’s few surviving buildings: his garden
structures of the 1750s at Hagley and Shugborough show great sensitivity to their
landscape settings, the ‘Shepherd’s Monument’ at Shugborough being a superb
representative of eighteenth-century romantic primitivism.
Robert Adam had been sufficiently aware of the potential of Stuart’s work to
delay the publication of his own Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro,
but when Adam’s great work did appear in 1764 its direct effect on architecture was
the more considerable because its author was already successfully established in a
working architectural practice. He was also very much the leading light of that
practice: James and William Adam played vital roles, but it Robert who dominated
the Adam business through his ‘brilliance as a designer and his enormous capacity
for work’.7 The Adams were effective managers and self-promoters as well as
successful architects: they made extensive use of employed and subcontracted labour
for drafting and craft work, and used mass production and standardisation in the
production of articles such as doorknobs, fire grates and balustrades; they actively
cultivated new clients and assiduously attacked their competitors, including Stuart
himself. Not least, the Adams effectively disseminated their ideas and achievements
through their publications, using their study of Diocletian’s palace and the later
Works of Robert and James Adam as manifestos and advertisements for their work – by
contrast, Stuart signally failed to exploit The Antiquties of Athens to his advantage in a
similar way.
Stuart, overall, showed no particular interest in making a successful business of
his architectural discoveries and ideas. He worked alone, never establishing an office
on the modern Adam model, taking little trouble to advertise himself or to seek out
work – he received such work as he undertook mainly through friends in the Society
of Dilettanti. The results of this difference in attitude between the Adam brothers
and Stuart are readily apparent in their respective productivity: the list of Adam’s
works in Howard Colvin’s Dictionary of British Architects 1600-1840 (1978 edition)
covers six pages, while the equivalent list for Stuart, admittedly summarising a shorter
career, takes up just over one page. Personality differences were clearly important in
this. The Adams, and Robert Adam in particular, were all efficient, hard-working, and
apparently single-minded in their devotion to the architectural profession. Stuart,

7 Colvin, Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, p. 47.

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however, was indolent, unreliable, unconcerned about making money or being

successful: for the majority of his working life ‘his commissions were random, his life
one of cheerful indolence, and his works often completed by other hands’. 8 In short,
Adam was active and energetic in promoting his style; Stuart was passive and
uncommitted in making anything of his.
There was more to the limited impact of Stuart’s Greek style during the
eighteenth century than the architect’s own failings, however. The underlying spirit of
much British architecture throughout the century, despite the innovations and
experiments referred to above, remained rooted in Palladian classicism; Palladianism
provided the standard against which other styles were judged. Furthermore, the great
age of building was over by midcentury, limiting scope for the use of new styles to
interior decoration, small projects such as garden structures, and alterations to
existing buildings. The Adam style, decorative, eclectic, adaptable, and basically an
interior style, flourished in these applications; and, although highly distinctive –
‘everything the Adams touched they made completely their own’ 9 – it could be
imitated and applied by other architects. The Greek style which Stuart employed was
less amenable to compromise or adaptation: in presenting a more thoroughgoing
challenge to traditional classicism and to the Roman-derived British neoclassicism in
the later eighteenth century, it remained harder to absorb into the contemporary
stylistic canon. Thus, while the Adam style was widely accepted, applied and imitated,
Stuart’s Greek style remained just one of a number of novel architectural styles
competing for attention.
Which of the two architects can be regarded as the more truly ‘neoclassical’
remains something of an open question. It can be argued that Stuart was in fact the
more clearly neoclassical architect, firmly in an English tradition of classicism
stretching back to the early seventeenth century, linking the architecture of Inigo
Jones with that of the age of the picturesque. Stuart remained faithful to the Greek
style which he had sought out and recorded, while Adam’s style was a compromise, a
‘synthesis of his own creation’.10 This was in large measure the key to Adam’s
success, for he accurately interpreted the desires of his clientele in an age of aesthetic
flux and responded with a style which was itself a compromise. Both the Adam style
and Stuart’s antiquarian publications ‘came at precisely the right moment for those

8 David Watkin, Athenian Stuart (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982), p. 13.
9 John Summerson, The Architecture of the Eighteenth Century (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969), p.
263.
10 J. Mordaunt Crook, The Greek Revival (London: John Murray, 1972), p. 72.

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who were jaded with Palladianism and had begun to learn that Rome itself must not
be considered the paragon of classical perfection’. 11
There can be no doubt that Stuart failed to fulfil expectations during his lifetime,
and today he is seen as a relatively minor, if interesting, figure. During the first half
of the nineteenth century, however, estimation of ‘Athenian’ Stuart was much higher;
Joseph Gwilt, in his influential Encyclopedia of Architecture (1842), saw Stuart’s
influence as beneficial in returning classical architecture to its pure sources in the
civilization of Greece and reversing the trend towards the degenerate styles of
Imperial Rome. Gwilt praised ‘the chasteness and purity’ of Stuart’s style which had
‘had to contend against the opposite and vicious taste of Robert Adam, a fashionable
architect whose eye been ruined by the corruption of the worst period of Roman
art’.12 As late as 1854, Owen Jones could claim that Stuart and Revett had ‘generated
a mania for Greek architecture, from which we are barely yet recovered’.13 Seen from
the first half of the nineteenth century, a period which had been dominated by the
Greek Revival, Stuart’s work took on more significance; his continuing importance
throughout this period can be judged from the fact that new editions of The
Antiquities of Athens were published in 1825, 1837, 1841, 1849 and 1858. A modern
scholar has echoed these nineteenth-century views by writing of Stuart that ‘it was
he, more than anyone else, who opened men’s eyes to the dignity and merit of Greek
architecture’.14 It can be argued that it was Stuart rather than Adam who breathed
fresh life and vigour into classicism, giving the Greek style an energy which was to
sustain it into the 1860s. Considered in a longer perspective his role in laying the
foundations of the Greek revival gives his work more long-term significance in terms
of the development of neoclassicism in Britain from the beginning of the nineteenth
century to the beginning of the twentieth than the transiently fashionable designs of
Robert Adam.

© Ralph Harrington 2005.

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11 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press), p. 314.
12 Joseph Gwilt, Encyclopedia of Architecture (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1842), p.
224.
13 Quoted in Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1980), p. 11.
14 Watkin, Athenian Stuart, p. 13.