[46] Design for a ceiling for the second drawing room, 1772, unexecuted

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Town houses
  - London
    - St James's Square, number 20, London, designs for a house and interiors for Watkin Williams-Wynn, c1772-1777 (99)
      - Preliminary designs and designs for a ceiling for the second drawing room, c1772 (4)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 12/52

Purpose

[46] Design for a ceiling for the second drawing room, 1772, unexecuted

Aspect

Plan of an apsidal-ended, square ceiling ornamented with figurative roundels enclosed within bands of Vitruvian scroll, surrounded by calyx supporting baskets of flora, all set within lozenges. The lozenges are surrounded by symmetrical cruciform compartments, which are ornamented with central rosettes, surrounded by calyx supporting anthemia. These compartments are flanked by smaller lozenges containing rosettes, and these are enclosed by festoons of husks. The apses are bordered by scrolled hearts, and are ornamented with a part-patera set within an oval band of calyx, anthemia and arabesques, and an oval band of fluting. Beyond this there are radiating compartments containing urns and rosettes set within lozenges surrounded by calyx. The compartments are separated by a band of guilloche, and are bordered by bands of calyx

Scale

bar scale of ½ inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Cieling for the 2.d Drawing room at Sir Watkin Wynn’s in S.t James’s Square- / not executed / 52.

Signed and dated

August 1772
Adelphi / 10.t August 1772

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, wash and coloured washes including olive green, pink, verdigris and Prussian blue on laid paper (607 x 449)

Hand

Possibly
Office hand, possibly Giuseppe Manocchi

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 49
King, 2001, Volume I, pp. 22, 277
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.

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