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Designs for the library, 1767, executed with minor alterations (3)

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The library at Kenwood is one of Adam's finest interiors, and these designs show it almost as executed.

Adam volume 14/114 shows alternative designs for the sofas in the recesses to either side of the chimneypiece, but this may not originally have been the case as the left-hand version has been cut away, and the present version affixed into place. It is this left-hand sofa design that is closer to the executed version. Otherwise, the design was executed almost exactly as shown, but with a little more ornamental moulding on the bookcases. Moreover, the drawing is almost exactly as shown in The works in architecture of Robert and James Adam (1774, Volume I, Part II, plate v), with the left-hand sofa design, but with alternative painted panels, including an alternative overmantel, which in The works is a portrait of Mansfield.

Similarly Adam volumes 14/115 and 14/113 were executed almost as shown. With regard to Adam volume 14/115 the executed curtain cornices are less elaborate, the wall panels to either side of the windows were omitted, and there are narrow bands of moulding above the frieze which are not shown here or in Adam volume 14/113. Moreover, Adam volume 14/113 makes use of slightly different scrolls in the soffits than were executed.

The pier glasses seen in Adam volume 14/115 are shown almost exactly in The works in architecture of Robert and James Adam (1774, Volume I, Part II, plate viii), and the east end of the library, as seen in Adam volme 14/113, is shown in The works (1774, Volume I, Part II, plate vi), but with alternative painted panels.

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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.

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).  


Contents of Designs for the library, 1767, executed with minor alterations (3)