[69] Design for a bookcase for Lady Williams-Wynn’s dressing room, 1776, as executed

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Town houses
  - London
    - St James's Square, number 20, London, designs for a house and interiors for Watkin Williams-Wynn, c1772-1777 (99)
      - Designs and a record drawing for a bookcase for Lady Williams-Wynn's dressing room, 1776 (3)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 17/222

Purpose

[69] Design for a bookcase for Lady Williams-Wynn’s dressing room, 1776, as executed

Aspect

Elevation of a bookcase set within a niche, with socle feet and tapering fluted legs, which terminate in capitals containing rosettes. Above this there is a frieze ornamented with rosettes and with wreaths containing rosettes which form a lock and handles. The wreaths are linked with festoons. Above the frieze there is a band of laurel leaf tips. Pilasters ornamented with calyx and anthemia flank the bookcase doors, which contain decorative panels. The panels are ornamented with arabesques and calyx supporting tablets containing swags and rosettes, and the tablets are surmounted by urns flanked by winged griffins. The panels have central cameos set within wreaths with aprons of swags, rosettes and calyx. Above this there are arabesques and tubular flowers which support urns bearing anthemia, and these are flanked by festoons of husks. The bookcase has a frieze of laurel leaf tips, with a central tablet depicting a chariot drawn by putti, and the case is surmounted by red-figure urns

Scale

bar scale of 1 ¼ inches to 1 foot

Inscribed

Design of a Bookcase for Lady Wynn’s Dressing room- / This is the side x (pencil) / 11 / 222 (pencil)

Signed and dated

February 1776
Adelphi / 9.t Febry 1776

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, wash and coloured washes including Indian yellow, pink, verdigris and terre verte on laid paper (241 x 406)

Hand

Possibly
Office hand, possibly Joseph Bonomi

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 50
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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