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Alternative design, finished drawing and record drawing for the ceiling of the library, 1763-64 (3)

Notes

Adam's library was located at the east end of the south range at Audley End, and was formed out of a single-storey pavilion, in which Lady Portsmouth had installed a library in the 1750s. As this pavilion was rebuilt it allowed Adam to install higher ceilings than in the majority of the house.

Adam's library was demolished in 1825 along with the study and supper room. His ceiling, the executed design for which is not entirely certain, was destroyed when the space was divided into a bedroom and two dressing rooms. At this time a new library was installed in the storey above where some of Adam's original bookcases survive.

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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).  


Contents of Alternative design, finished drawing and record drawing for the ceiling of the library, 1763-64 (3)