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Working drawings and finished drawing for a chimneypiece for the round drawing room, 1767, as executed (3)

Notes

The chimneypiece was executed in accordance with these drawings, and survives in situ. It is based on the Confessor’s tomb, and the Cosmati pavement at Westminster Abbey.

Harris has described the chimneypiece as ‘an attempt to produce Italian thirteenth-century cosmati work (glass and stone mosaic) in a 1760s English drawing room, it is a freak, an antiquarian curiosity dreamed up and directed by Horace Walpole’.

According to Stillman, Adam’s neo-classicism is more apparent in the chimneypiece than in his ceiling for the round drawing room, as various features are taken from his characteristic repertoire, classicising much of what he borrowed from the Confessor’s tomb.

One of the working drawings (Adam volume 18/61) is in very poor condition, suggesting that it has been used by the craftsmen who produced the chimneypiece.

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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).  


Contents of Working drawings and finished drawing for a chimneypiece for the round drawing room, 1767, as executed (3)