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Notes
If Adam volume 14/14 was ever executed, it does not survive. Extensive works under Wyatt saw the north wall rebuilt and the room extended to the south, and so it is likely that the ceiling was replaced at this time. King suggests that strips of ceiling decoration visible to either side of the fireplace in the current yellow drawing room may consist of reused parts of an earlier Adam ceiling. It is therefore possible that these strips were taken from the third drawing room ceiling.
Harris notes a similar use of the groin vault, in a comparable ceiling design made for the dressing room of Lady Williams-Wynn (SM Adam 12/54 - 12/56).
Level
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).