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  • image SM Adam volume 23/108

Reference number

SM Adam volume 23/108

Purpose

[5] Design for a chimney piece for the eating room, 1778, as executed

Aspect

Elevation of a chimney piece comprising stiles adorned with urns, calyx, and cascading enclosed rosettes, terminating in urns on pedestals, with enclosed rosettes bound by a wreath and calyx batons in the capitals, and a frieze comprising three urns with festoons with enclosed rosette drops in between. There is a sketch elevation for an alternative stile comprising a tall pedestal adorned with a mask with festoons and cascading husks enclosing rosettes, surmounted by an urn and a fluted capital with egg and dart moulding and ram head masks

Scale

bar scale of 1 1/2 inches to 1 foot

Inscribed

Chimney Piece for the Eating room at Culean Castle / (in pencil) X Mrs [_ _ _ _ _ _]

Signed and dated

  • 1778
    1778

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and wash on laid paper (408x292)

Hand

Possibly
Adam office hand, possibly Joseph Bonomi or Robert Morison

Watermark

GR surmounted by a fleur de lis within a crowned cartouche

Notes

This chimneypiece was executed with the alternative stile decoration. It was relocated to the former library/study in the 1870s by Wardrop and Reid when the room was converted into a large dining room with the adjoining dressing room, and the eating room converted into a library.

Literature

Bolton, 1922, p. 9
Harris, 2001, pp. 329-330
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).