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Notes
The pencil inscription on this drawing, Body of Building D[urham Yard] / Front Drawing room 3d [House], suggests that Adam had intended to reuse the design at the Adelphi, as was the case with various other chimneypiece designs of the 1760s. In this case it was clearly intended for use in the front drawing room of 3 Royal Terrace. Indeed a variant of this design, with a duplicate stiles, variant tablet, and alternate frieze was made for the front drawing room at 3 Royal Terrace (Adam volume 24/30), corresponding with the pencil inscription.
Level
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).