[25] Design for a ceiling for the great drawing room (now the portico room), 1776, as executed

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Town houses
  - London
    - Apsley House, Piccadilly, London: plans, elevations, section and designs for the interior, and an elevation for the gatehouse, for the 2nd Earl Bathurst, 1771-1779 (56)
      - Design for a ceiling for the great drawing room (now the portico room), 1776, as executed (1)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 14/13

Purpose

[25] Design for a ceiling for the great drawing room (now the portico room), 1776, as executed

Aspect

Plan of a rectangular, tripartite ceiling with a chimney breast shown on one long side. The central square compartment is ornamented with a figurative medallion enclosed within an octagonal fan ornamented with drop calyx and panels depicting putti riding griffins. Beyond this there is a band of enclosed anthemia segmented by lion masks and festoons of beading and of husks, which suspend peltoid shields. All this is enclosed by a band of Vitruvian scroll segmented by four corner tablets depicting putti. The tablet is surmounted by cameos flanked by winged sphinxes, and has an apron of arabesques, pendent oil lamps and festoons. The central compartment is flanked by rectangular compartments, ornamented with medallions set within lozenges, ornamented with tubular flowers, and these in turn are enclosed by a border of calyx and rosettes. Each compartment has a border of fluting

Scale

bar scale of 3 inches to 5 feet

Inscribed

Design of a Ceiling for the second Drawing Room at Apsley House / Window Side / faint pencil notation top and bottom right hand corners

Signed and dated

April 1776
Adelphi / 5th April 1776

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and coloured washes including verdigris, olive, pink, cerulean blue and violet on laid paper (608 x 422)

Hand

Possibly
Office hand, possibly Joseph Bonomi

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II Index p. 43
Harris, 2001(b), p. 100
King, 2005, p.282
Lea, 2005, pp. 9, 15
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.

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