[2] Design for an overmantel mirror frame for the front drawing room, c1789

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Town houses
  - London
    - Great George Street, number 28, London, designs for mirror frames for the drawing rooms for Sir James Eyre, c1789, unexecuted (3)
      - Designs for a pier glass and overmantel mirror frame for the front drawing room, c1789 (2)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 3/14

Purpose

[2] Design for an overmantel mirror frame for the front drawing room, c1789

Aspect

Elevation of an overmantel mirror frame with stiles formed with paired Ionic pilasters, ornamented with bands of anthemia. At the base of the stiles there are three-branch candelabra, with bases formed with fans, surmounted by urns ornamented with lion masks and a band of fluting, and supporting anthemia and tubular flowers. Above this there are bands of anthemia, enclosed within lozenges, and this has an apron of peltoid shields, which suspend drop calyx, festoons of beading and rosettes within roundels. The capitals contain urns flanked by winged griffins, and the frieze contains a central figurative tablet. The mirror frame is surmounted by a central urn, ornamented with anthemia and fluting, and this is flanked by recumbent, winged sphinxes, and further urns

Scale

bar scale of 1 1/2 inches to 1 foot

Inscribed

Design of a Glass frame over the Chimney Piece in the front Drawing room at The Lord Chief Barons in Great George Street and some dimensions given

Signed and dated

c1789
c1789

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and coloured washes including cerulean blue, Indian yellow and pink on laid paper (309 x 521)

Hand

Possibly
Office hand

Watermark

JWAHTMAN

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index, p. 37
Harris, 1963, p. 55
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

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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