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Notes
Harris has noted that the second design comprises Adam's earliest known use of terms on a mirror frame - a motif which he repeated during the 1770s.
Within the National Trust drawings collection at Osterley Park there are designs for a pier glass and a girandole for the back drawing room. Six girandoles were executed, as was the pier glass, although according to Harris, the unusual rounded corners suggest that in this instance Adam was reworking an older frame.
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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.
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 Alternative preliminary design and finished drawings for an overmantel for the back drawing room, 1770-71, unexecuted (3)
- [13] Finished drawing for an overmantel for the back drawing room, 1770, unexecuted
- [14] Preliminary design for an overmantel for the back drawing room, 1771, unexecuted
- [15] Finished drawing for an overmantel for the back drawing room, 1771, unexecuted