[37] Finished drawing for a ceiling for the second drawing room, 1775, as executed

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Town houses
  - London
    - Home House, Portman Square, number 17 (now 20), London, for the Countess of Home, 1775-78 (73)
      - Alternative preliminary design and design, record drawing and finished drawing for a ceiling for the second drawing room, 1775 (4)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 12/167

Purpose

[37] Finished drawing for a ceiling for the second drawing room, 1775, as executed

Aspect

Plan of a rectangular ceiling with a central tripartite design. The central compartment is ornamented with a figurative medallion enclosed within a fan ornamented with arabesques. Beyond this there is a band of guilloche, and urns flanked by half-putti and arabesques which alternate with panels containing cameos, and bands of beading and enclosed calyx. Beyond this there are corner paterae enclosed within fans and bands of guilloche. The central compartment is flanked by rectangular compartments ornamented with urns, swags, festoons, arabesques and anthemia enclosed within semi-circular bands of Vitruvian scroll, urns with half-putti and arabesques, beading and calyx. Each compartment is bordered with a band of anthemia alternating with calyx and all this is bordered by flora enclosed within wreaths. There is an additional alcove with niches on one short side and this is ornamented as in Adam volume 12/165

Scale

bar scale of 6 inches to 10 feet

Inscribed

Cieling of the Drawing room at Lady Home's in Portman Square / 167

Signed and dated

March 1775
Adelphi / 25 March 1775

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and coloured washes including olive green, violet, pink and cerulean blue on laid paper (601 x 401)

Hand

Possibly
Office hand, possibly Joseph Bonomi

Verso

(Modern curatorial hand, pencil) vol. 12. 167 / 65

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 48
Hussey and Oswald, 1934, p. 26
Lewis, 1967, p. 448
Whinney, 1969, pp. 48-9, 64
King, 2001, Volume I, p. 304 fig. 426, pl. XXIX
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Original Drawings of Robert and James Adam, Kenwood House, London, 1953
Robert Adam's London, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 30 November 2016 - 11 March 2017

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).