Design for a ceiling after the antique with a central circle containing a figure, around which are four irregular panels each containing an urn and bird. Various borders of stylised forms, in the outermost of which are eight small squares, some containing figures.

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Robert and James Adam travel drawings
- Adam Volume 26

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Reference number

Adam vol.26/182

Purpose

Design for a ceiling after the antique with a central circle containing a figure, around which are four irregular panels each containing an urn and bird. Various borders of stylised forms, in the outermost of which are eight small squares, some containing figures.

Aspect

Ceiling plan

Signed and dated

Undated, probably 1760 - 1763

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, watercolour, bodycolour; red border 373 x 465

Hand

Giuseppe Manocchi

Notes

This is one of a set of highly-finished, coloured drawings of a similar size (see Adam vol.26/168, 169, 179-182, 185, 187, 189 and 190) by Giuseppe Manocchi (1731-82), which parallel those found in Adam volumes 15 and 16. The design here is close to that in Adam vol.26/168; the differences lie in some of the figure panels and the stylised details of the borders. There is a further, unfinished version in the Manocchi drawings amongst the Hardwick albums in the RIBA (see J. Lever, Catalogue of the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects, L-N, London, 1973, p.93).

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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