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Purpose
Notes
Harris has suggested that the blue colour scheme rather than green, and the use of griffons rather than sphinxes in Adam volume 17/156, may show that this earlier scheme for a bed was intended for 38 Berkeley Square, or an entirely different client who rejected it. This is not known.
Inspiration for the form of the state bed has been variously suggested as the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates at Athens, and the Temple of Venus at Pomona.
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).
Contents of Preliminary design, and variant finished drawings for the state bed, 1775-76, drawings 61-62 as executed (4)
- [59] Preliminary design for the state bed, 1775
- [60] Finished drawing for the state bed, 1775
- [61] Finished drawing for the state bed, 1776, as executed
- [62] Finished drawing for the state bed, 1776, as executed