[30] Unfinished design for a commode for the great drawing room (now the portico room), 1778, possibly as executed

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Town houses
  - London
    - Apsley House, Piccadilly, London: plans, elevations, section and designs for the interior, and an elevation for the gatehouse, for the 2nd Earl Bathurst, 1771-1779 (56)
      - Unfinished design and design for a commode for the great drawing room (now the portico room), 1778-1779, possibly executed, (2)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 17/35

Purpose

[30] Unfinished design for a commode for the great drawing room (now the portico room), 1778, possibly as executed

Aspect

Elevation of a segmental commode with a tripartite front and tapering legs, ornamented with ox skulls, rosettes and drop of calyx. The capitals contain cameos and the frieze is ornamented with anthemia enclosed by semi-circular bands of beading. The central compartment is ornamented with a central figurative roundel enclosed within a wreath and flanked by portrait medallions, swags and arabesques. The central compartment is flanked by side compartments ornamented with a central patera enclosed within a wreath, and with ox skulls and festoons

Scale

bar scale of 1 ½ inches to 1 foot

Inscribed

Commode for the second Drawing room at Apsley House

Signed and dated

October 1778
Adelphi / 29. Oct. 1778

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and coloured washes including Naples yellow, pink and olive green on laid paper (460 x 250)

Hand

Possibly
Office hand, possibly Joseph Bonomi or Robert Morison

Verso

Preliminary design for a commode, comparable to SM Adam volume 17/35. With central figurative medallion, portrait medallions, paterae, wreaths, ox skulls, and with tapered legs, to a scale, (pencil), inscription Commode for Lord Bathurst (pencil)

Watermark

GR surmounted by a fleur-de-lis within a crowned cartouche

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 44
Harris, 1963, pp. 57, 76
Harris, 2001(b), p. 100
Lea, 2005, p. 12
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

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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