[15] Design for a ceiling for the drawing room, 1779, unexecuted

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Country houses
  - Wormleybury, Hertfordshire, executed designs for interiors and furniture, and designs for garden buildings, for Sir Abraham Hume, 1777-80 (24)
    - Design and record drawing for a ceiling for the drawing room, 1779, unexecuted (2)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 14/52

Purpose

[15] Design for a ceiling for the drawing room, 1779, unexecuted

Aspect

Plan of a rectangular ceiling, with a central tripartite design consisting of a square compartment ornamented with a medallion surrounded by ribbons, festoons of calyx, and peltoid shields. This is enclosed within a band of calyx and rosettes, with quarter-patera encircled by enclosed anthemia beyond. The square compartment is bordered by fret, and flanked by rectangular compartments ornamented with cameos encircled by bands of enclosed anthemia, forming roundels. The roundels are separated by rosettes, tubular flowers and anthemia. The rectangular compartments are bordered with bands of beading and calyx. Beyond the tripartite design, there are cameos set within lozenges, flanked by winged sphinxes, all on a band of fluting. This is linked by a further band of scrolled hearts. Beyond this there is a border consisting of half-medallions, bands of enclosed anthemia, and corner rosettes, all enclosed within bands of guilloche

Scale

bar scale of ¾ inches to 1 foot

Inscribed

Design of a Cieling for the Drawing room at Sir Abraham Hume’s at Wormleybury. / 52 / (and in pencil) Window / Window / Window / Door / and faint pencil inscription

Signed and dated

Jan 1779
11. Janry 1779

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and coloured washes including verdigris, Indian yellow, pink and cerulean blue on laid paper (570 x 439)

Hand

Possibly
Office hand, possibly Joseph Bonomi or Robert Morison

Verso

Vol XIV 52 34 (in modern curatorial hand)

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 31
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Original Drawings of Robert and James Adam, Kenwood House, London, 1953

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).