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Notes
There is a variant Adam office design for the chimneypiece, dated 1766, in the private collection of Lord St Oswald. This gives the same design, but without sphinxes in the tablet. There are four Adam office working drawings for different parts of the library chimneypieces, all datable to 1766, within the National Trust drawings collection at Nostell. There is a fifth working drawing for the overmantel frame, in Robert Adam’s own hand and dated 23 May 1767, within the family archive at the West Yorkshire Archive Service, Wakefield.
Level
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).