Record drawing for the ceiling of the state dressing room, 1761, unexecuted (1)

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Country houses
  - Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire: designs for landscape architecture, alterations to the house, and interior design for Sir Nathaniel Curzon, 5th Baronet (created Lord Scarsdale 1761), 1759-72 (149)
    - Designs for the interior decoration and furniture including the hall, saloon, drawing room, dining room, music room, library, ante room, breakfasting parlour, staircase, state bed room, and principal dressing rooms

Purpose

Record drawing for the ceiling of the state dressing room, 1761, unexecuted (1)

Notes

This ceiling design depicts Adam's intial intention to include a state dressing room with apsidal ends - partly seen in Adam's section (Adam volume 40/4) - which was located on the centre of the west front on the principal floor of the central block. This was not executed and the space became the state bed room. The arrangement of the state apartment was devided by Scarsdale himself in 1764, swapping Adam's state bed room (in what is now the boudoir) with the state dressing room. The rationale behind this decision was to create further space for his collection.

The pencil annotations of Sir Ellis Cunliffe refers to another of Adam's patrons who commissioned designs for the interior of his house at Wimbledon in 1766-67. This reference in particular is presumably related to the fact that the surviving drawing for Sir Ellis's drawing room ceiling (SM Adam volume 11/224) bears some similarity to this design, and may have been based on it.

There is another copy of this drawing in the Kedleston drawings collection.

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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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Contents of Record drawing for the ceiling of the state dressing room, 1761, unexecuted (1)

[126] Record drawing for the ceiling of the state dressing room, 1761, unexecuted