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Purpose
Signed and dated
- 1768-70
Notes
In 1768-70 the Adam office provided Thornhill with interior decorative designs for a drawing room and dining room within an unknown house. There are two schemes for a drawing room ceiling clearly intended for two differently shaped rooms, and there are two schemes for a drawing room chimneypiece, possibly also intended for two different rooms. There is also a design for a dining room chimneypiece on a diminutive scale, suggesting that it was intended for a small dining room, perhaps within a townhouse or cottage. None of these designs are known to have been executed.
Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam,1922, Volume II, Index pp. 58, 89; J. Ingamells, A dictionary of British and Irish travellers in Italy: 1701-1800, 1997, p. 938; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume II, p. 179
Frances Sands, 2015
Level
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).
Contents of Thomas and/or George Thornhill: designs for ceilings and chimneypieces for an unknown house, 1768-70, not thought to have been executed (7)
- Alternative record drawings for ceilings for drawing rooms, 1768-70, not known to have been executed (2)
- Alternative finished drawings and record drawings for a chimneypiece for a drawing room, 1769-70, not known to have been executed (4)
- Record drawing for a chimneypiece for a dining room, 1769, not known to have been executed (1)