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  • image SM Adam volume 17/157

Reference number

SM Adam volume 17/157

Purpose

[61] Finished drawing for the state bed, 1776, as executed

Aspect

Elevation of a four-poster, domed canopy bed, with paired fluted posts on pedestals, surmounted by winged sphinxes, enclosed anthemia crockets, festoons, and an alternative ornamental dome, and with a tester of tassels and lambrequins ornamented with anthemia, wreaths, and enclosed rosettes, and with a head board composed of putti flanking a portrait medallion, surmounted by dolphins

Scale

bar scale of 1 2/5 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Design of a Bed for Robert Child Esqr

Signed and dated

  • May 1776
    Adelphi / 16t May 1776

Medium and dimensions

Pen and coloured washes including verdigris and Indian yellow on laid paper (321 x 589)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly Joseph Bonomi

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume I, p. 296; Volume II, Index p. 25
Harris, 1963, pp. 51, 99
Tomlin, 1972, p. 61
Beard, 1978, pp. 54, 66
Harris, 2001, p. 174
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Original Drawings of Robert and James Adam, Kenwood House, London, 1953
In Pursuit of Antiquity: Drawings by the Giants of British Neo-Classicism, Sir John Soane's Museum, 1 February - 1 June 2008; Tchoban Foundation Museum für Architekturzeichnung, Berlin, 3 October 2015 - 14 February 2016

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).