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  • image SM Adam volume 50/28

Reference number

SM Adam volume 50/28

Purpose

[7] Finished drawing for the east and west sides of the great staircase, c1777, as executed

Aspect

Sections showing the west and east sides of the great staircase. The western section is shown with a central doorway on the ground storey, and with a landing above. At first-storey level there is a central grotesque panel flanked by a doorway to the right, and a plaque ornamented with an urn in relief to the left, with medallions, festoons and ribbons set above. At second-storey level the ornamentation is as Adam volume 50/27, but with the central compartment flanked by narrow panels ornamented with ribbons and drop calyx. The east section shows a pair of doorways on the ground storey, and on the first storey, there are paired doorways with fan lights above, and with a figurative roundel and an impost moulding between. At the second-storey level the ornamentation is as Adam volume 50/27

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

West End of Great Staircase / East End of Great Staircase / (and in the hand of William Adam) at Wormsley the Seat of Sir Abraham Hume (underwritten in pencil)

Signed and dated

  • c1777
    c1777

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, wash and pink wash within a single ruled border on laid paper (376 x 524)

Hand

Possibly
Office hand, with part title inscription in the hand of William Adam

Verso

Inscription obscured by paste to folio

Watermark

JWHATMAN

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 31
Harris, 2001, p. 71
King, 2001, Volume I, pp. 16, 26, 127, 258-59
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

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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