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  • image SM Adam volume 6/26

Reference number

SM Adam volume 6/26

Purpose

[18] Preliminary design for a girandole for the drawing room, c1779, possibly executed

Aspect

Elevation of a girandole, formed with a central tablet ornamented with rosettes, ribbons and festoons, flanked by branches bearing oil lamps, and surmounted by arabesques bearing an urn. The urn is ornamented with gadrooning, festoons, a band of Vitruvian scroll, and ram masks, and is surmounted by an anthemion and an arched band of calyx. The tablet has an apron consisting of a figurative roundel, olive branches, festoons, and an anthemion with a pendent peltoid shield

Scale

not to scale

Inscribed

Sir Abraham Humes Drawing room

Signed and dated

  • c1779
    c1779

Medium and dimensions

Pen on laid paper (184 x 227)

Hand

Probably
Robert Adam

Literature

Harris, 1963, p. 56
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.

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).