[12] Finished drawing for the interior decoration of the library, c1768, probably as executed with alterations

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Country houses
  - Saltram Park, Devon: designs for the house and estate, for John Parker, 1768-82 (31)
    - Finished drawing for the interior decoration of the library, c1768, probably as executed with alterations (1)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 50/67

Purpose

[12] Finished drawing for the interior decoration of the library, c1768, probably as executed with alterations

Aspect

Plan and laid out wall elevations of the library. Plan of a rectangular room with a canted bay with windows facing north; the placement of the bookcases is shown in brown against the walls. Four elevations show: an uninterrupted frieze of festoons and rosettes, bookcases with fluted friezes and Ionic pilasters ornamented with guilloche, each surmounted by a stucco medallion, a chimneypiece and doors both with corbels atop the stiles and a frieze of festoons and rosettes, and with overmantel and overdoor ruinscapes. The crimson curtains on the five windows are drawn up into gilded cornices decorated with a central anthemia and flanking calyx

Scale

bar scale of 3/8 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Design for finishing the Library at Saltram. The Seat of John Parker Esquire. Plan of the library and some dimensions given

Signed and dated

1768
datable to 1768

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, wash and coloured washes including pink and olive green within a single ruled border on laid paper (645 x 920)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly Joseph Bonomi

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 27
Beard, 1978, p.62
For full 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.

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