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Purpose

Finished drawings for the building and interior decoration, c1772 (3)

Notes

The proposed interior scheme was extremely opulent, making use of scagliola for the shafts of the screen columns, and dense ornamentation to the colourful walls and ceiling (Adam volume 12/120). Such opulence would have been expensive, and it was perhaps owing to this projected cost that the scheme was not executed.

These sections show that Adam was making use of his characteristic linear decoration of the 1770s, as well as multiple screened apses which he used throughout his career. Indeed, the scheme is datable by its style, as Stillman explains: 'The lithe arches of the back wall with their attenuated supports, the arabesque and bell flower stops, the complex alternating frieze, the capitals inspired by Spalatro, the Neo-classical subject panels, and the small-scale decorative panels of the apse and vault are all in keeping with Adam’s most exciting decorative projects of the same years (e.g. Derby House or Northumberland House).'

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Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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.

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Contents of Finished drawings for the building and interior decoration, c1772 (3)