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The Architecture of Dalquharran Castle Dalquharran is a country house of a medium size, but a castle style design of great presence, standing on a bluff with a large area of open ground providing the wider setting. In common with most of Robert Adam's castles this was a new building resolutely classical in interior decoration. Even the plan of the typical Adam castle was fundamentally classical. However the extent to which Adam's castles were updated versions of Inveraray changed dramatically over time. Inveraray was established in the Scottish cultural psyche but Adam's castles were quite different: they began to develop as integrated into the background of the newly-conceptualised 'Scottish landscape'. Adam himself played a leading role in creating such a concept. He had commented as early as 17?? (letter to Mrs Montague quoted in Bolton get ref).. "that on the dwarfing of Inveraray by its mountain landscape saying that 'the temple of Skidoo would etc (find quote). " It is clear that from the beginning Adam's castle style was an attempt to create a Scottish Romantic form in a landscape. From the building of Inveraray in 1746 until 1800, thirty castle projects were built in Scotland, of which 13 were by Robert Adam. Adam's castles had their beginnings in the architectural reaction of Robert and his brother-in-law John Clerk to the growth of Ossianic Romanticism, as well as to the international landscape movement seen in the 'classical landscapes' of the painters Claude and Poussin. Adam's Castle Style developed from the 1770s from a boxy profile with undulating or Palladian square turreted walls at Ugbrooke (1763 ) and Mellerstain (1770-8) and Wedderburn into a far less recognisably 'classical' form of heavily modelled, barely attached turrets creating a convincingly rhetorical castle form. It is not unreasonable to think of Adam's castle style buildings as artistic experiments, not all of which were successful. This was a novel and untried area of architecture. The drawing together of classical and military architectural elements in the same design was a gamble which did not always pay off. These unsuccessful experiments in the castle style are mostly to be found in drawings rather than built projects and a proposed scheme for the courtyard at Dalquharran (31/49) is perhaps one of these.
Notes and References 1.
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