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Preliminary designs and finished drawings for the walls for the third drawing room, 1780-85, unexecuted (5)

Notes

Adam designed three adjacent drawing rooms for the principal (first) floor of Cumberland House. The first drawing room was to be in the north-east corner of the house, the second in the south-east corner, and the third was in the centre of the south front. None of the drawing rooms were executed.

For the wall treatment of this room Adam designed grotesque panels, a motif that he had used regularly since the 1760s. Here, however, they are more flat and refined than earlier examples, being characteristic of the mature style of the Adam office.

According to Stillman the chimneypiece for this room, seen in Adam volume 49/18, is similar to that for the drawing room at Wynn House, 20 St James's Square (Adam volume 23/10) which also makes use of ornamental painted panels.

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Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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 finished drawings for the walls for the third drawing room, 1780-85, unexecuted (5)