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  • image Adam vol.7/46

Reference number

Adam vol.7/46

Purpose

London: Parliament House (designs for). Unfinished design for half of a circular ceiling showing two alternative designs of radiating circles and rectangular panels with foliage decoration in the central rose.

Aspect

Ceiling plan verso sketch

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1762-63

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen on brown washed paper 215 x 325

Hand

James Adam, Office of

Verso

Geometric forms in pencil, possibly for setting out a ceiling design.

Notes

This design is a companion to that in Adam vol.7/45, and both are 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 brown 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, which was also connected with James Adam.

Level

Drawing

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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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