Designs for the library, 1760, executed with alterations (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

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Designs for the library, 1760, executed with alterations (5)

Notes

The library is located in The south-east corner of the principal floor of the central block, between the saloon and the drawing room. The plan does not correspond with the wall elevations as it has been updated to show a broader bookcase on the east wall, and door to the south-east pailion, and matching false door. This corresponds with the drawings for the library in the Kedleston drawings collection, and must date from 1765 when the south-east pavilion - and therefore the need for a door into the south-east quadrant - was abandoned.

The bookcases seen in these drawings are imitations of Linnell's bookcase designed for Lady Scarsdale's dressing room in 1760. The bookcases in the library were executed to the same design by a local craftsman. The swan-neck pediments were removed in 1848, along with the doors with octagonal glazing bars, though happily these doors were later reinstated and remain in situ.

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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 Designs for the library, 1760, executed with alterations (5)