Design and alternative finished drawing for a sofa, and finished drawing for a chair, for the drawing room, 1762, sofa executed with alterations and delivered in 1762 (3)

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Country houses
  - Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire: designs for landscape architecture, alterations to the house, and interior design for Sir Nathaniel Curzon, 5th Baronet (created Lord Scarsdale 1761), 1759-72 (149)
    - Designs for the interior decoration and furniture including the hall, saloon, drawing room, dining room, music room, library, ante room, breakfasting parlour, staircase, state bed room, and principal dressing rooms

Purpose

Design and alternative finished drawing for a sofa, and finished drawing for a chair, for the drawing room, 1762, sofa executed with alterations and delivered in 1762 (3)

Notes

Though produced by John Linnell, these drawings were signed off by Robert Adam. Adam took no part in the design of the sofas, but according to Harris his influence can be detected in the ornamental motifs: ‘the gadrooned seat rail, the shape of the back, the medallion credit, and the use of mermaids and tritons as arm supports’. Horace Walpole thought the sofa 'absurdly like' the coronation coach of George III, and there are indeed similarities between the executed sofas and this magnificent vehicle. The sofas took three years to make and were delivered to Kedleston in 1765. There are two 13-foot long sofas made with merfolk arms to stand either side of the chimneypiece, and two 12-foot long sofas with triton and sea nymph arms to stand against the end (north and south) walls. Hardy and Hayward suggest that these were possibly the grandest sofas made in Britain during the eighteenth century.

The nautical theme of the sofas is continued in the blue damask upholstery, walls and of the sofas, walls and curtains. The original blue damask was removed in 1906, but it was rewoven by the National Trust and installed in 2006 in memory of John Cornforth. An unexecuted design for a painted ceiling on a nautical theme survives amongst the drawings at Kedleston, and according to Harris the nautical theme of the room 'celebrates Britain's "Year of Victories" at sea in 1759 and George III's accession in 1760 as 'Monarch of the Ocean', which brought Curzon his long-awaited peerage'. The sofa's merfolk supporters themselves are related to those in William Chambers’ Treatise on civil architecture (1759).

The executed sofas vary slightly from Linnell’s drawings at the Soane Museum, and are more closely related to the drawings in the Kedleston drawings collection and at the V&A. There are five Linnell drawings for this sofa in the V&A: three preliminary designs and two finished drawings. The same design was used for Mrs Montagu’s sofas in her house on Portman Square, and one of these survives in the possession of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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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).

Contents of Design and alternative finished drawing for a sofa, and finished drawing for a chair, for the drawing room, 1762, sofa executed with alterations and delivered in 1762 (3)