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Preliminary design, unfinished design, record drawing and four working drawings for the chimneypiece for the great drawing room, as executed 1777 (7)

Notes

This beautiful marble chimneypiece with inlaid scagliola ornament must have been the 'centre of attraction' on the south wall of the great drawing room (Harris). Adam volume 22/276 and 22/277 are variants of one another, and it is Adam volume 22/277 that represents the overall chimneypiece as executed. It can be seen in photographs, taken in 1913, stripped of its fluted frieze and coloured scagliola ornaments. The effect of the original can only be visualised from these colour-washed drawings.

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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.

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, unfinished design, record drawing and four working drawings for the chimneypiece for the great drawing room, as executed 1777 (7)