[2] Preliminary design for a ceiling for the drawing room, 1770, unexecuted

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Town houses
  - London
    - Northumberland House, The Strand, London: designs for the drawing room and dining room for the 1st Duke of Northumberland, 1770-79 (24)
      - Alternative preliminary designs and finished drawing for a ceiling for the drawing room, 1770, Adam volume 11/33 as executed (3)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 11/32

Purpose

[2] Preliminary design for a ceiling for the drawing room, 1770, unexecuted

Aspect

Unfinished plan of a rectangular ceiling, divided by bands of cable moulding. There is a central square compartment containing a central, shaped octagonal medallion, encircled by enclosed anthemia, peltoid shields hung from arabesques and anthemia, and fans, all set within a circular frame of festoons and lion masks, and a circular frame of cable moulding, with a square of cable moulding on each side, containing calyx and a lozenges enclosing a crescent. There is are triangles in the corners of the central square containing enclosed masks, urns, half-figures and rinceaux. The central square compartment is flanked by tripartite rectangular compartments, with a central rectangle containing an oval medallion, enclosed within an oval band of enclosed anthemia and peltoid shields, and an oval frame of festoons and lion masks, and with an enclosed rosette in each corner. The outer compartments contain an enclosed patera and calyx within a lozenge, framed by rosettes and fans, and set within an oval frame of festoons and lion masks, and with an enclosed rosette in each corner

Scale

bar scale of ½ inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Cieling for the Drawing room at Northumberland House / not executed

Signed and dated

June 1770
June 1770

Medium and dimensions

Pen and pencil on laid paper (571 x 435)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly William Hamilton or Joseph Bonomi

Watermark

XDCB within cartouche

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 42
Harris, 2001, pp. 96, 344
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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