Design for a chimneypiece for the octagonal dressing room, and preliminary design for an overmantel mirror, possibly as executed, c1786 (2)

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
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    - Marlborough House, Brighton, Sussex, designs for a house and its interior, for W.G. Hamilton, as executed, c1786 (13)

Purpose

Design for a chimneypiece for the octagonal dressing room, and preliminary design for an overmantel mirror, possibly as executed, c1786 (2)

Notes

There were a number of Adam chimneypieces within the house in the Adam style. These, however, were subsequently removed, and according to The Guardian, 5th August 2015, destroyed in a London warehouse fire.

Photographic evidence (c1995) records a chimneypiece in the drawing room of Marlborough House to the design of SM Adam 23/146, with minor alterations. The inscription for SM Adam 23/146 assigns it to John Hussey Delaval’s London townhouse, 21 Hanover Square; however there is a further faint pencil inscription which reads Built (?) – W.G. Hamilton.

Pencil notations for the overmantel mirror design provide a guide to costing, based on the degree of ornamentation used.

Level

Group

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 Design for a chimneypiece for the octagonal dressing room, and preliminary design for an overmantel mirror, possibly as executed, c1786 (2)