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  • image SM Adam volume 11/33

Reference number

SM Adam volume 11/33

Purpose

[3] Finished drawing for a ceiling for the drawing room, 1770, as executed

Aspect

Plan of a rectangular tripartite ceiling, divided by bands of cable moulding, and with a border of enclosed rosettes, and paired enclosed anthemia. There is a central square compartment containing a central medallion encircled by a frame of enclosed rosettes, fans, and panels of urns flanked by rinceaux, set within an octagonal frame, with squares on four alternating sides containing rosettes, and lozenge-shaped medallions and alternating with festoons. Beyond this there are segmental compartments containing segmental figurative panels, encircled by bands of enclosed anthemia, and calyx crockets, and with a drop in each corner composed or urns, rinceaux, winged griffons, half-figures, anthemia, bell flowers, peltoid shields and calyx. The central square compartment is flanked by tripartite, rectangular compartments, with a central rectangular compartment containing an oval medallion, enclosed within a band of rosettes within figure-of-eight ribbons, and set within an oval frame, encircled by alternating festoons, and squares containing rosettes and lozenge-shaped cameos, and with a fan in each corner. The flanking compartments contain segmental figurative panels, encircled by bands of enclosed anthemia, and calyx crockets, and with an enclosed mask in each corner

Scale

bar scale of 1 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Cieling for the Drawing room at Northumberland House as executed

Signed and dated

  • June 1770
    June 1770

Medium and dimensions

Pen and coloured washes including verdigris, Prussian blue and pink on laid paper (979 x 617)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly William Hamilton or Joseph Bonomi

Watermark

PVL

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 42
Stillman, 1966, p. 102
Harris, 2001, pp. 100, 344, 345
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

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

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).