Record drawings of a tripod perfume burner designed by James Stuart, c1760-62 (3)

Explore Collections

You are here: CollectionsOnline / Record drawings of a tripod perfume burner designed by James Stuart, c1760-62 (3)

Browse

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

Record drawings of a tripod perfume burner designed by James Stuart, c1760-62 (3)

Notes

Tripods were antique objects used as temple offerings. They are described as such by Homer, and presumably Scarsdale would have been aware of this. This particular design, based on the Choragic Monument to Lyscrates in Athens, is certainly by James Stuart as rough preliminary designs for it are held in the Kedleston drawings collection, and it was described as 'Mr Stewart's Tripod' by the Duchess of Northumberland, following her visit to Kedleston of 1766, showing that Scarsdale himself - as her host - was clear about the authorship of the object. Moreover, there was a contemporary, near identical tripod made by Stuart for the painted room at Spencer House (V&A). The tripod was made by Diederich Nicolaus Anderson, and was delivered to Scarsdale's London house at 5 Mansfield Street prior to its dispatch up to Kedleston in 1762.

These drawings, along with others of metalwork designed by James Stuart, were made by the Adam office in order to assist him in designing the plate arrangement for the sideboard tables in the niche of the dining room.

Level

Group

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).

Browse

Purpose

Notes

Level

Contents of Record drawings of a tripod perfume burner designed by James Stuart, c1760-62 (3)