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Design for the walls and ceiling for the library, c1780, executed with alterations (1)

Notes

This drawing is one of two relating to the library, which was situated in the main central part of Byram (see also Adam volume 17/209). According to Bolton, it was the 'most complete' of Adam's interiors for Sir John Ramsden. Although the library was lost during the 1947 demolition, a Country Life photograph indicates that it was broadly executed according to Adam's design, although the configuration of the doorway and (at least some) ceiling decoration was altered. According to King, two screens of Corinthian columns were installed in line with this drawing, but Country Life photographs are more ambiguous. The arrangement of bookcases rising the full length of the walls is not typical of Adam - a solution probably recommended by the presence of a low ceiling.

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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 the walls and ceiling for the library, c1780, executed with alterations (1)