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Preliminary designs and a record drawing for alternative designs for the ceiling for the hall, 1760-61, unexecuted (4)

Notes

The hall is located on the central axis of the central block, on the principal floor, on the north front, between the music room and the dining room. It is 67 x 37 feet and 40 feet high, and was inspired by Palladio's Egyptian Hall, and Burlington's Assembly Rooms at York. The hall functioned as a grandiose entrance, and as a sculpture gallery. Making use of sculpture-filled niches had originally been Brettingham's idea, giving him the opportunity to sell casts to Curzon from 1760. Kenworthy-Browne suggests that Curzon must have instructed Paine and Adam to retain the use of niches in the hall in order to preserve its function as a gallery for his casts (see Adam volumes 40/3 and 40/4). The Nottinghamshire alabaster columns were fluted in 1775 under the direction of George Richardson (a former draughtsman of the Adam office), who was also responsible for the removal of Adam's chimneypiece and the design of the ceiling, executed by Joseph Rose. Adam's interior decoration of the hall had been postponed owing to financial considerations.

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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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Contents of Preliminary designs and a record drawing for alternative designs for the ceiling for the hall, 1760-61, unexecuted (4)