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  • image SM Adam volume 8/121

Reference number

SM Adam volume 8/121

Purpose

[4] Preliminary design for the ceiling for the front drawing room, 1769, as executed

Aspect

Rough plan of a tripartite, rectangular ceiling, with a central square compartment containing a large circular frame, containing a central rosette or medallion, encircled by figures alternating with rosettes enclosed within wreaths of calyx which connect to festoons of calyx enclosing segmental tablets around the edges of the circular compartment, and beyond this in the corners of the central square compartment are rosettes enclosed within fans, and festoons, and the central square compartment is flanked by rectangular compartments containing a repeating pattern of roundels and rosette enclosed within figure-of-eight wreaths

Scale

not to scale

Signed and dated

  • c1769
    datable to 1769

Medium and dimensions

Pencil on sugar paper (431 x 305)

Hand

Robert Adam

Literature

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).