[5] Design for the chimney wall for the drawing room, 1770-73, executed with minor alterations

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Town houses
  - London
    - Northumberland House, The Strand, London: designs for the drawing room and dining room for the 1st Duke of Northumberland, 1770-79 (24)
      - Designs for the walls of the drawing room, 1770-73, executed with minor alterations (3)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 39/6

Purpose

[5] Design for the chimney wall for the drawing room, 1770-73, executed with minor alterations

Aspect

Elevation of a wall with a central chimneypiece with term stiles, a frieze of rinceaux and a figurative tablet, surmounted by urns, candelabra, a clock, and a Venetian window-shaped overmantel mirror frame supported by terms, and ornamented with festoons. The chimneypiece is flanked by a dado with an apron of festoons, in front of which are sofas and chairs, and above are further Venetian-window shaped mirrors ornamented with calyx, urns, medallions and lotus capital pilasters. Between the mirrors are girandoles incorporating medallions. The room has a frieze of anthemia and urns

Scale

bar scale of 1 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Section of the Drawing Room Northumberland House London (in the hand of William Adam and underwritten in pencil)

Signed and dated

1770-73
datable to 1770-73

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, wash and coloured washes including pink, verdigris and Indian yellow on laid paper (1012 x 519)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly William Hamilton or Joseph Bonomi, with title inscription in the hand of William Adam (underwritten in pencil)

Watermark

D&CBLAUW IV and XDCB within cartouche

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 42
Harris, 1963, pp. 56, 82
Stillman, 1966, pp. 74, 94
Harris, 2001, pp. 98, 99, 344, 345
King, 2001, Volume I, p. 314
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Original Drawings of Robert and James Adam, Kenwood House, London, 1953

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).