Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  [15] Design for the walls for the Etruscan / octagonal dressing room, 1775, possibly executed

Browse

  • image SM Adam volume 32/104

Reference number

SM Adam volume 32/104

Purpose

[15] Design for the walls for the Etruscan / octagonal dressing room, 1775, possibly executed

Aspect

Elevation of a wall with a central chimneypiece set within a niche ornamented with vertical bands of beading and bands of enclosed rosettes. Above this a winged griffin is set within a semi-circular compartment with a border of beading, and all this is surrounded by a band of enclosed anthemia. The niche is flanked by a pair of doors with ornamental panels containing rosettes, tripods bearing anthemia, and urns with festoons. The cornice has a frieze of enclosed fluting and calyx and the overdoors form figurative tablets. The doors are flanked by further niches with a central rectangular panel ornamented with robed figures enclosed within a border of calyx, corner fans and a border of beading. Above this there are further winged griffins set within a semi-circular compartment with a borader of beading. Above all this there is a frieze of enclosed fluting and calyx

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

Section of a Room in Apsley House for the Lord Chancellor (in the hand of William Adam)

Signed and dated

  • June 1775
    Adelphi June 27th 1775

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and coloured washes including verdigris, Indian yellow, black on laid paper (489 x 313)

Hand

Possibly
Office hand, possibly Joseph Bonomi with title inscription in the hand of William Adam

Watermark

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

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 43
Harris, 2001(a), p. 352, n.113
Harris, 2001(b), p. 101
Lea, 2005, p. 10
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).