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  • image Adam vol.7/45

Reference number

Adam vol.7/45

Purpose

London: Parliament House (designs for). Unfinished design for half of a circular ceiling showing two alternative radiating patterns of circles and rectangles with rosette and anthemion decoration. Below are details of coffers in pencil.

Aspect

Ceiling plan, details

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1762-63

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen on grey washed paper 217 x 343

Hand

James Adam, Office of

Notes

This design, and the variation on it in Adam vol.7/46, are both presumably for ceilings of the circular hall in James Adam's Parliament scheme of 1762/63, although the decoration contains no national or royal symbols such as are found in other designs for the scheme; the grey paper would suggest that they are part of such a set of drawings. The composition here is similar to that found in several drawings by Giuseppe Manocchi (1731-82) in Adam volume 26, a volume that was also connected with James Adam.

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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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