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  • image SM Adam volume 20/177

Reference number

SM Adam volume 20/177

Purpose

[28] Preliminary design for a girandole for the great drawing room (now the portico room), 1778, possibly executed

Aspect

Elevation of a girandole composed of a central oval medallion enclosed within a wreath and surmounted by a tablet ornamented with rosettes and swags. The tablet supports a tripod, ornamented with ram masks and flanked by fauns supporting festoons of husks. The medallion has an apron consisting of calyx, an enclosed rosette and a tubular flower, and it is flanked by a pair of urns, each supporting candle branches

Scale

bar scale of 1 ¼ inches to 1 foot

Inscribed

For the Great Drawing room for Apsley House

Signed and dated

  • January 1778
    Adelphi / 31st Janry 1778

Medium and dimensions

Pencil and pen on laid paper (242 x 405)

Hand

Probably
Robert Adam

Watermark

JWHATMAN

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 44
Harris, 1963, p. 57
Harris, 2001(b), p. 100
Lea, 2005, p. 11
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.

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).