[2] Design for the library, 1758-63, unexecuted

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Country houses
  - Fonthill Splendens, Tisbury, Wiltshire: unexecuted designs for the house, interior decoration, and a bridge for Alderman William Beckford, date range: 1758-70 (9)
    - Design for the library, 1758-63, unexecuted (1)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 50/31

Purpose

[2] Design for the library, 1758-63, unexecuted

Aspect

Plan and laid out wall elevtions for a library with a two-bay window wall, each window within a relieving arch, and flanked by bookcases articulated by Ionic pilasters and within a segmental arch ornamented with festoons, and opposite are two large bookcases with small pediments, separated by paired Ionic pilasters, and each within a segmental arch, and adjacent to the two-bay window wall is a one-bay window wall, in the same arrangement with pilasters, bookcases and arches, and opposite is a chimneypiece, flanked by doors and Ionic pilasters, and underneath a segmental arch

Scale

bar scale of 3 inches to 10 feet

Inscribed

Library at Fonthill the Seat of / William Beckford Esqr (all in the hand of William Adam and underwritten in pencil)

Signed and dated

1758-1763
Date range: 1758-63

Medium and dimensions

Pen and pencil on laid paper (591 x 492)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly Agostino Brunias or Laurent-Benoit Dewez, with title inscription in the hand of William Adam

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 13
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).