Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  [44] Finished drawing for the ceiling for the ante-room, 1775, as executed

Browse

  • image SM Adam volume 12/168

Reference number

SM Adam volume 12/168

Purpose

[44] Finished drawing for the ceiling for the ante-room, 1775, as executed

Aspect

Plan of a circular ceiling with a central figurative roundel encircled by bands of enclosed anthemia and rosettes, with lion masks and festoons of beading beyond. All this is enclosed within a band of interlacing circles formed from beading and ornamented with drop calyx and pendent roundels containing rosettes. This is linked with a band of calyx. The overlaps are ornamented with anthemia and tubular flowers, and the ceiling is bordered by a band of fluting

Scale

1 1/8 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Cieling of the Anti room at Lady Home's in Portman Square

Signed and dated

  • Jan 1775
    Adelphi / Janry 27t 1775

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, wash and coloured washes including pink, Naples yellow, terre verte, and cerulean blue on laid paper (372 x 454)

Hand

Possibly
Office hand, possibly Joseph Bonomi

Notes

Half of the ground for this ceiling is washed in pink, and the other half in yellow. It appears that Adam was offering variations for the colour scheme.

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 48
Hussey and Oswald, 1934, p. 26
Whinney, 1969, pp. 51, 66
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

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).