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Design for a chimneypiece and overmantel mirror frame for the drawing room, c1780 (1)

Notes

This drawing is a large-scale study of the chimneypiece and overmantel mirror that appear in the plan and laid out wall elevations of the drawing room at Byram (Adam volume 50/70). Grotesque ornament on the chimneypiece echoes decorative motifs on the frieze, Corinthian pilasters and door panels, demonstrating Adam's attempts to draw varied design components into a unified overall scheme. The existence of this drawing of a mirror is seen by King as an indication that the project for the drawing room progressed beyond the design stage.

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Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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 Design for a chimneypiece and overmantel mirror frame for the drawing room, c1780 (1)