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Purpose

Finished drawing for a ceiling for the hall-cum-dining room, 1773, executed with alterations (1)

Notes

In 1773 a decision was taken that the hall, located on the ground floor at the centre of the north front, should also function as a dining room, making use of the medieval concept of a dining hall. As such, Bacchic elements were incorporated into the design after this drawing was made, but prior to execution. The ceiling was altered to have festoons instead of fans around the central band of guilloche, and Antonio Zucchi's central medallion depicts Bacchus and Ceres, rather than the figure of Justice - appropriate to Mansfield - which is shown in this drawing. Similarly, the overmantel paintings above George Burns's 1773 chimneypiece - executed to a lost design by Adam - depicts Diana the huntress.

The colour scheme of blue and green was recreated from paint analysis in 1997, having been lost since the eighteenth century. This colour scheme is unusual for one of Adam's halls, which were more commonly white, cream and stone, but was undoubtedly decorated in blue and green in response to the dual purpose of the room as both a hall and dining room.

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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 Finished drawing for a ceiling for the hall-cum-dining room, 1773, executed with alterations (1)