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Record drawing for a ceiling for the drawing room, c1766-73, executed with alterations (1)

Notes

The drawing room is located on the principal storey of the house in the south range, adjacent to one end of the gallery to the west, the hall to the north, and the tapestry room to the east.

The room was probably begun in 1763 for Francis Child. The ceiling was executed with alterations to this drawing, with a different number and scale of octagonal coffers, which are painted in trompe l'oeil. The ceiling survives in situ. The arrangement shown in the drawing is closer to Robert Wood's illustration of the soffitt at the Temple of the Sun at Palmyra. Harris has suggested that another influential example for Adam's drawing room ceiling at Osterley may have been the Temple of the Sun ceiling in the nave of West Wycombe Church, painted for Sir Francis Dashwood in 1763 by Giovanni Borgnis.

There is an Adam office set of laid-out wall elevations for the drawing room within the National Trust drawings collection at Osterley.

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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.

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Contents of Record drawing for a ceiling for the drawing room, c1766-73, executed with alterations (1)