Browse
Purpose
Notes
This is one of very few rooms worked on by Adam for which he designed furniture, but was otherwise uninvolved in the interior decoration. This happened elsewhere at Osterley, in the gallery, and the taffeta bedchamber.
A pair of the breakfast room sideboard tables and pier glasses were executed in accordance with the design shown on the flier of this drawing. The pier glass frames are composed of gilt wood, and the pier tables are gilt wood surmounted by marble tops. They survive in situ.
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).