[26] Finished drawing for the north wall of the music 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)
      - Finished drawings for the music room, 1775, as executed (4)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 50/34

Purpose

[26] Finished drawing for the north wall of the music room, 1775, as executed

Aspect

Elevation of the music room, with a central chimneypiece with stiles ornamented with ram masks and swags suspending musical instruments. The capitals contain roundels enclosing instruments and there is a frieze of strigils and further roundels. The mantel is surmounted by a clock and an overmantel mirror frame with stiles ornamented with fans surmounted by draped figures, husks, wreaths surmounted by anthemia, ram masks and swags. The capitals contain cameos flanked by sphinxes, and the frame is surmounted by a central cameo and urn flanked by winged griffins. All this is set within a relieving arch flanked by doors set within niches with semi-domed ceilings. The overdoors are ornamented with lyres, half-putti and arabesques. Above this there is a frieze of festoons and musical instruments and a further frieze of enclosed anthemia. The semi-domed ceiling is ornamented with a central patera enclosed within a foil and beyond this there are bands of swags, calyx and arabesques, and rosettes alternating with calyx. The apses are flanked by pilasters in a tripartite arrangement, with mirrored strips flanked by Corinthian pilasters supported by a base ornamented with medallions, festoons and ox skulls. The mirrored strips are ornamented with rosettes, festoons and anthemia, with candle branches set in front and the pilasters are surmounted by urns in relief

Scale

bar scale of 3 1/2 inches to 5 feet

Inscribed

Section of the Musick Room at Lady Homes

Signed and dated

Jan 1775
Adelphi / Janry 27. 1775

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and wash on laid paper (596 x 442)

Hand

Possibly
Office hand, possibly Joseph Bonomi

Verso

2 / 2 / (and in a modern curatorial hand, pencil) Vol. 50 / Vol 50 61

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 48
Hussey and Oswald, 1934, pp. 18-20, 26
Harris, 1963, pp. 57, 83-4
Whinney, 1969, pp. 44, 46, 63
King, 2001, Volume I, pp.27, 290-91, fig. 409-10, pl. XIV
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

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.

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