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  • image SM Adam volume 22/55
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Reference number

SM Adam volume 22/55

Purpose

[9] Finished drawing for a chimneypiece and overmantel mirror frame for the drawing room, 1773, showing an unexecuted scheme for the chimneypiece and the overmantel mirror frame as executed with alterations

Aspect

Elevation of a chimneypiece and overmantel mirror frame. The chimneypiece is ornamented with drops composed of masks, peltoid shields, cameos, lanterns, and calyx in the stiles, and there are L-shaped compartments running from the stiles to the frieze, ornamented with naturalistic anthemia, and urns enclosed within festoons of beading, and with a tablet ornamented with oval medallions flanked by urns. The overmantel mirror frame is a variant of Adam volume 20/17, but with pedestal compartments ornamented with swags, rosettes and sphinxes, and the terms are surmounted by cameos, female figures instead of urns, urns instead of tubular flowers, a slightly different arrangement of rinceaux and bell flower festoons, and the medallion is flanked by gadrooning supporting a lion, a unicorn, trophies and a ducal crown

Scale

bar scale of 1 ¾ inches to 1 foot

Inscribed

Chimney Piece for the Drawing room at Northumberland House

Signed and dated

  • 1773
    Adelphi / 1773

Medium and dimensions

Pen and coloured washes including Indian yellow and cerulean blue on laid paper (358 x 600)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly William Hamilton or Joseph Bonomi

Watermark

PVL

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 42
Stillman, 1966, p. 93
Harris, 2001, p. 345
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.

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).