Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Preliminary design and finished drawing for a ceiling and design for the walls of the Etruscan / octagonal dressing room, c1775, possibly executed (3)

Browse

Purpose

Preliminary design and finished drawing for a ceiling and design for the walls of the Etruscan / octagonal dressing room, c1775, possibly executed (3)

Notes

Drawings for the ceiling, wall elevation and frieze of the Etruscan dressing room (SM Adam volume 14/15, 32/104, 53/10), suggest from design and inscription that it was circular in execution. However, the ground storey plan, (SM Adam volume 32/101), shows the dressing room to be octagonal in form. Further to this, Lea notes that a survey plan, dating to 1796, also records the room as octagonal. The significance of the design scheme is noted by Harris, as it displays an early example of Adam’s use of the Etruscan style, and possibly the first known use of the device in a wall treatment to have been executed (SM Adam 32/104).

Level

Group

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).  


Contents of Preliminary design and finished drawing for a ceiling and design for the walls of the Etruscan / octagonal dressing room, c1775, possibly executed (3)