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Finished drawings for a ceiling for the tapestry room, 1772, as executed (2)

Notes

The tapestry room is located on the principal storey of the house, at the centre of the south range, and between the drawing room to the west, and the state bedchamber to the east. It functioned as a magnificent ante room to the state bedchamber.

According to Harris, this was the fifth house on which Adam had worked where Gobelins tapestries were installed. These were designed by Jacques Neilson, the director of the tapestry works, and they arrived in London and were installed at Osterley in the summer of 1776. In addition, a settee, eight arm chairs, a fire screen and a chimney board were also covered in tapestry. The furniture was probably made by Linnell in c1775.

The tapestry room ceiling was executed in accordance with Adam's design, and is comparable to his later, 1770 ceiling for the Duchess of Bolton's dressing room at Bolton House (SM Adam volume 12/5). Harris has noted that the colour scheme of the ceiling was not directed by the tapestry, which was probably only recently decided upon, and not yet ordered. The tapestry room ceiling survives in situ.

There is an Adam office drawing for the tapestry room chimneypiece within the National Trust drawings collection at Osterley.

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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 Finished drawings for a ceiling for the tapestry room, 1772, as executed (2)