Preliminary design and finished drawings for the walls of the dining room, 1762 (5)

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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

Preliminary design and finished drawings for the walls of the dining room, 1762 (5)

Notes

Adam volume 40/23 shows the niche that was included on the west wall of the dining room to house a large Sicilian jasper wine cooler that had been designed for Scarsdale by James Stuart in 1757. The most noteworthy change to this design in execution is that the ornamentation within the head of the niche radiates down, rather than up in a fan. There is a plan and colour washed alternative drawing in the Kedleston drawings collection showing curved sideboard tables, which were supplied by local craftsmen, to display Scarsdale's collection of plate. The plate is shown in the Kedleston drawing and it was arranged in accordance with this design in 1765. The curved sideboard tables were one of Adam's earliest designs for furniture. Harris explains that 'the combination of various pieces and objects seems spiritually akin to the picturesque congeries of antique fragments which were the delight of most late eighteenth-century artists in Rome, especially Piranesi and Clérisseau'.

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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.

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Contents of Preliminary design and finished drawings for the walls of the dining room, 1762 (5)