John (1721-1792), Robert (1728-1792), James (1730-1794), and William (1739-1822), of whom Robert and James were the most distinguished. In addition to their great achievements as architects, they were famous as designers of internal decorations and furniture in a beautiful and refined classic spirit. From about 1760 to the death of the two more outstanding brothers they produced an enormous volume of work, designing public buildings, private houses and, wherever possible, their contents. The co-ordination of Robert's schemes presented him with opportunities which scarcely any other English architect has enjoyed. Nothing was too small for his inventive or adaptive skill, and he could design a knife-box or a wine cooler with the same elegance and grace as a facade or a ceiling. His furniture, no doubt, is unequal and sometimes over-adorned, but, even when not at its best, his work is admirably conceived, and if its elegance is occasionally feminine, his sense of style and proportion never deserted him. Robert Adam made extensive use of the characteristic honeysuckle swags of classical origin, paterae, delicate flutings, and wreaths of flowers festooned between rams' heads. Much of his furniture was painted with amorini, sphinxes, and arabesques by Pergolesi, Zucchi and Angelica Kauffmann; sometimes it was adorned with Wedgwood plaques. Many of his designs were carried out by Chippendale. We are thus presented with the piquant circumstance of the leader of one school of furniture working to the patterns of the leader of another and very different school. Adam furniture, like that of Chippendale, Hepplewhite and Sheraton, is an exhilarating study. It was less various and less influenced by changing taste than the work of Chippendale, because in itself it imposed a taste ; but it was more uniform and less eccentric than some of the impracticable designs of Sheraton. Artistically speaking, the name of Adam was the greatest of them all, because the brothers were all-pervading, and excelled in architecture and decoration as well as in the designing of furniture, but from the mobiliary point of view Chippendale comes first. Adam designs are to be found in "Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam, Esquires," 3 vols., 1773.