Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  [30] Preliminary design for an organ case for the music room, May 1781

Browse

  • image SM Adam volume 25/19

Reference number

SM Adam volume 25/19

Purpose

[30] Preliminary design for an organ case for the music room, May 1781

Aspect

Plan and elevation of a tripartite organ case, articulated by Corinthian pilasters, with organ pipes in the outer bays, and an arched recess in the central bay, containing a figurative panel. The pedestal is ornamented with enclosed rosettes, and swags. Immediately beneath the attic is a band of enclosed anthemia. The attic contains further pipes, swags, terms, and an oval medallion. The entablature frieze contains enclosed anthemia, and the whole is surmounted by sculpted musical instruments either side of the royal coat of arms, a lion and a unicorn, and with pencil annotations on the right-hand side

Scale

bar scale of 9/10 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Organ Case for The Duke of Cumberland

Signed and dated

  • May 1781
    2d May 1781

Medium and dimensions

Pen and pencil on laid paper (427 x 599)

Hand

Robert Adam

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 44
Harris, 1963, Index p. 57
King, 2001, Volume II, pp. 273, 275
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).