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  • image SM Adam volume 11/172

Reference number

SM Adam volume 11/172

Purpose

[1] Design for a ceiling for the drawing room at 41 Portman Square, 1766, unexecuted

Aspect

Plan of a rectangular, tripartite ceiling, divided by a border of enclosed rosettes, rinceaux, and winged griffons flanking urns. The central square contains a central roundel, set within a lozenge containing rinceaux, and enclosed by rosettes and festoons, and with a fan in each corner, enclosed by a band of Vitruvian scroll. The rectangular side compartments contain rinceaux of volute-shaped acanthus leaves, rosettes, anthemia, and drops of calyx

Scale

bar scale of 1/2 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Cornish (in pencil) / [cropped] at Morning a Sketch ready to this [cropped] (in pencil) / Cieling for the Drawing room for Willm Locke Esqr

Signed and dated

  • 1766
    1766

Medium and dimensions

Pen and pencil on laid paper (441 x 332)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly Robert Nasmith or William Hamilton

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 48
King, 2001, Volume II, p. 130
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

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.

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).