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Mr Macdonald: design for a bookcase for an unknown house, 1778, not known to have been executed (1)

Signed and dated

  • 1778

Notes

Mr Macdonald is unknown, but Bolton has suggested that this may have been William Macdonald (b 1732) who was Secretary of the Highland Society in 1784-1804. In 1778 he commissioned Adam to make a design for a bookcase, but the intended location for the bookcase is unknown, and the design is not known to have been executed.

Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index pp. 56, 79; E. Harris, The furniture of Robert Adam, 1963, p. 59

Frances Sands, 2015

Level

Scheme

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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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Contents of Mr Macdonald: design for a bookcase for an unknown house, 1778, not known to have been executed (1)