Preliminary designs and finished drawings for alternative designs for an organ case, 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 designs and finished drawings for alternative designs for an organ case, 1762 (5)

Notes

Adam volume 54/3/22 is inscribed Sir Nathaniel and therefore must date from before April 1761 when Curzon was created Lord Scarsdale, and Adam volumes 25/2 and 25/3 are inscribed Lord Scarsdale and therefore must date to after April 1761.

Scarsdale approached Adam as early as 1758 for a design for an organ case. The original organ was an instrument by Snetzler, but this was deemed too large and overpowering for the music room at Kedleston, and it was replaced with a more modest version, with new designs being made by Adam for the case in 1765. None of these designs were executed, although the executed organ case, supplied by a local craftsman in December 1765, is a much simplified version of Adam volumes 25/2 and 25/3, without the winged figures, arms, or decorative panels. It does make use of the Ionic pilasters, the frieze, and is surmounted by the same urns. Moreover, these winfed figures were reproduced in Adam's design for an organ case for Sir Watkin Williams Wynn for his house in St James's Square. Stillman notes that the heaviness of these designs is typical of Adam's early style, and that the caryatids and winged figures recall the caryatid chimneypieces which Adam designed for various early projects including the drawing room at Kedleston (Adam volume 22/15).

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Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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 designs and finished drawings for alternative designs for an organ case, 1762 (5)