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  • image SM Adam volume 13/145

Reference number

SM Adam volume 13/145

Purpose

[1] Finished drawing for a ceiling for the front drawing room, 1769, executed with minor alterations

Aspect

Plan of a rectangular ceiling, with a central medallion, encircled by a fluted frame, four anthemia, a lozenge-shaped frame ornamented with miniature rosettes, festoons, and the whole is set within an oval frame of reed and ribbon, which extends into a guilloche pattern, with four roundels on each side of the oval, each containing a medallion, and a segmental compartment on each side, each containing an urn flanked by winged sphinxes, and between these portions of guilloche are four quadrilateral compartments containing urns flanked by winged griffons, and the whole has a border with a medallion in each corner, enclosed within a fluted frame, and between these are compartments of rinceaux, within frames ornamented with miniature rosettes

Scale

bar scale of 3/5 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Design of a Cieling for the Front Room one pair of Stairs at Colonel Burgoyne's House

Signed and dated

  • 1769
    Robt. Adam Architect 1769

Medium and dimensions

Pen, wash and coloured washes including pink, olive green and violet on laid paper (582 x 426)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly William Hamilton or Joseph Bonomi

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 40
Draper, 1999, p. 130
King 2001, Volume I, p. 309
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

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).