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Preliminary design and record drawing for the ceiling for the drawing room, 1769, as executed (2)

Notes

Adam’s drawing (tapestry) room is a large rectangular room, located on the ground storey, at the centre of the garden (west) front, between the ante room and William Weddell’s dressing room. It is now known as the tapestry room owing to the ‘Les Amours de Dieus’ Boucher-Neilson Gobelins tapestries on the walls. Weddell may have visited the Gobelins factory as early as the autumn of 1763, during his first trip to France. He selected tapestries following the same design as those commissioned by another of Adam’s patrons, the Earl of Coventry for Croome Court. The measurements of the room were provided to the Gobelins factory by John Carr, prior to Adam’s arrival, and the tapestries were delivered in lots between 1767 and 1769.

Further to the tapestries, the room contains French pier glasses, seat furniture by Chippendale, also upholstered in tapestry, and curtain cornices and a carpet designed by Adam. The ceiling was executed in accordance with Adam’s design. It survives in situ, but has since been repainted. The original colour scheme of pink, green and brown has been replaced with lighter tones intended to mimic the faded effect of the tapestries below, which were once pink and are now tan.

There is a quarter-drawn colour-washed Adam office duplicate of Adam volume 11/240 at the West Yorkshire Archive Service, Morley (WYL5013/D/1/9/2).

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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.

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 Preliminary design and record drawing for the ceiling for the drawing room, 1769, as executed (2)