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  • image SM Adam volume 11/111

Reference number

SM Adam volume 11/111

Purpose

[4] Finished drawing for a ceiling for the library, 1764, unexecuted

Aspect

Plan of a rectangular, compartmental ceiling divided by bands of guilloche, and with apsidal ends screened by columns. The central flat is ornamented with a central medallion, encircled by bands of griffins, anthemia and winged half-figures, and figurative panels and medallions in the corners. The apses are ornamented with a central patera, triangular panels containing arabesques and half-putti, and a border of anthemia and strigils

Scale

bar scale of 3 inches to 10 feet

Inscribed

Design of a Cieling for the Library at Kenwood House in Middlesex

Signed and dated

  • 1764
    James Adam Archt 1764

Medium and dimensions

Pen and wash within a single ruled border on laid paper (614 x 363)

Hand

James Adam

Watermark

Fleur-de-lis within crowned cartouche

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 19
Stillman, 1966, p. 71
Beard, 1978, p. 47
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).