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  • image SM Adam volume 24/51

Reference number

SM Adam volume 24/51

Purpose

[4] Unfinished design for a chimneypiece for the drawing room, 1776, possibly executed

Aspect

Elevation of a chimneypiece, with Doric stiles ornamented with a figure-of-eight band enclosing rosettes, and with a capital containing a turned baluster, supporting an urn. The frieze is ornamented with anthemia, alternating with urns, and all enclosed within a band of scrolled hearts. There is a central tablet, which contains a further urn and a recumbent, winged sphinx. The mantel is ornamented with bands of dentils and of acanthus leaves

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

Chimney Piece for the Drawing room in Mr. Adam's House Fredericks Place- (underwritten in pencil) / 31. and some dimensions given

Signed and dated

  • August 1776
    (in a second hand) Adelphi / August 1776. / (cropped)

Medium and dimensions

Pen and pencil on laid paper (406 x 291)

Hand

Probably
James Adam

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index, p. 60
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.

Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).