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  • image SM Adam volume 11/161

Reference number

SM Adam volume 11/161

Purpose

[76] Design for the ceiling for the 1st drawing room (now the yellow drawing room), 1765-1768

Aspect

Plan of a rectangular, tripartite ceiling, with a central square compartment containing a central rosette, encircled by enclosed anthemia, and fans, a circular frame of fluting, a circular band of double calyx, and within an x-shaped arrangement, ornamented with festoons, rosettes, vines, drops of calyx, and vesica-shaped medallions, and the x-shaped arrangement is framed by festoons, rosettes, peltoid shields, and rinceaux, and the central square compartment is within a square frame of enclosed rosettes, and a border of rosettes enclosed within lozenges enclosed within wreaths. The central compartment is flanked by tripartite rectangular compartments, with a central enclosed rosette, encircled by enclosed drops of calyx, flanked by rectangles containing lozenges, anthemia, and rinceaux, as executed

Scale

bar scale of 7/10 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Design of a Cieling for the 1st Drawing Room on the right hand side of the Saloon at Harewood House / Ground round / rose yellow / Ground of H[ _ _ _] / Dark green / Scallops of fans / A Yellow / B Lay [ _ _ _ _ _] / Shields & fig / purple / Purple band / C Dark g / D Light green / yellow / blue ground / Roses / Purple gold / E Lay [ _ _ _ _] / F yellow / G Light green / H yellow / Patterns at / back Enf y / A / C / D / E / F (in feint pencil)

Signed and dated

  • 1768
    1768

Medium and dimensions

Pen and coloured washes including pink on laid paper (591 x 451)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly Joseph Bonomi

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 16
Mauchline, 1992, p. 82
Harris, 2001, p. 140
Harris, 2007, p. 87
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Original Drawings of Robert and James Adam, Kenwood House, London, 1953

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

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).