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Alternative preliminary design and finished drawings for an overmantel for the front drawing room, 1770-71 (3)

It is not known if one of Adam's designs for the front drawing room overmantel was executed. There is no evidence of this except for the inclusion of a 'noble' chimney glass in the 1860 inventory of the house.

Harris has called the first design a 'precursor of the overmantel mirror designed two years later for the Glass Drawing Room at Northumberland House', being more like a wall ornament than a mirror frame. The second design, she has noted, comprises Adam's first known use of seated female figures on top of a frame - a device which Adam later used regularly, including on the pier glass in the Etruscan dressing room at Osterley.

Within the National Trust drawing collection at Osterley Park there are designs for a console table and pier glass, and for a girandole for the front drawing room. Both designs were executed in pairs in c1765-70, probably by John Linnell. The console tables and pier glasses were sold at Christies on 23 May 2012.
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