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  • image SM Adam volume 23/98

Reference number

SM Adam volume 23/98

Purpose

[27] Design for a chimneypiece for the first library, 1777, possibly executed

Aspect

Elevation of a chimneypiece with Doric pilaster stiles which contain panels in the form of fire screens. The panels contain ovals depicting winged sphinxes, and with aprons of rosettes and arabesques above. The capitals contain pedestals supporting urns ornamented with anthemia and flanked by drop calyx suspending rosette roundels. The frieze contains a central tablet ornamented with a wreath crossed by branches

Scale

bar scale of 1 ½ inches to 1 foot

Inscribed

First Library room Chimney Piece at Roxburghe House (underwritten in pencil) / All Statuary / Statuary with Globe in tablet (pencil) / 98 / faint pencil inscription

Signed and dated

  • December 1777
    Adelphi / 31.st Dec.r 1777.

Medium and dimensions

Pen and pencil on laid paper (408 x 291)

Hand

Possibly
Office hand, possibly Joseph Bonomi

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 40
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.

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).