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According to Christopher Gilbert, the sofas and armchairs for the saloon at 19 Arlington Street were the most expensive that had ever been made in this style. They were sold by the Marquis of Zetland at Sotheby's, London, following the demolition of the house, on 6 June 1947. The sofas were sold again at Christie's, London, on 3 July 1997, and are now at Duff House, Banff. Within the same sale was a pair of the armchairs. These armchairs were acquired by the National Museum of Scotland in 2002. A third chair is within the collection at the V&A Museum, and is still upholstered in the original red damask. There are no known extant drawings for the armchairs.
As well as designing the sofas and armchairs, Adam also made a design for six painted terms for the corners of the saloon. These were made to support brass girandoles. Adam charged Dundas £3.3s. for the design in 1765, and a pair of these terms survive at the V&A. Although there is no extant drawing for the term design, it has been noted by Harris that similar designs survive at the Soane Museum for Sir John Astley at Patshull (SM Adam volume 17/58) and Sir John Griffin Griffin at Audley End (SM Adam volume 17/59).
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).