[2] Design for the ceiling of the great room, 1766

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Town houses
  - London
    - Fife House, Whitehall, London: designs for interior decoration, for James Duff, 2nd Earl of Fife, 1766-67 (4)
      - Preliminary design, design, and record drawing for the ceiling of the great room, 1766, drawing 3 as executed (3)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 11/196

Purpose

[2] Design for the ceiling of the great room, 1766

Aspect

Plan of a detail of a compartmental ceiling, with a central medallion enclosed by a band of anthemia, calyx and arabesques, an octagonal band of enclosed anthemia, lunettes containing military trophies or winged griffons, arabesques, and oval medallions, all within a square band of scrolled hearts, and framed by circular and octagonal medallions, enclosed by wreaths of bell flowers, arabesques, and half figures, and with a border of guilloche enclosing rosettes, framed by small fans, and bands of scrolled hearts

Scale

bar scale of 3/5 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Design of a painted Cieling for the Great room at The Earl of Fife's House Whitehall

Signed and dated

1766
1766

Medium and dimensions

Pen and coloured washes including Indian yellow, red and cerulean blue on laid paper (761 x 613)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly William Hamilton

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 51
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Original Drawings of Robert and James Adam, Kenwood House, London, 1953

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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