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Notes
According to Stillman this ceiling may have been inspired by one of c.220AD in the crypt of Lucina in the catacomb of St Calixtus in Rome. Its x-shape arrangement is similar to other Adam ceilings of the late 1760s and early 1770s, notably the Northumberland House (1770) and Chandos House (1771) drawing rooms.
The ceiling minus its cove and bow was purchased for Percy Pyne in 1911 and installed in his house at 680 Park Avenue, New York, where it remains.
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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.
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).
Contents of Preliminary design and finished drawing for the ceiling of the Duchess of Bolton's dressing room, as executed, 1770 (2)
- [4] Preliminary design for the ceiling of the Duchess of Bolton's dressing room, as executed, 1770
- [5] Finished drawing for the ceiling of the Duchess of Bolton's dressing room, as executed, 1770