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  • image SM Adam volume 17/88

Reference number

SM Adam volume 17/88

Purpose

[5] Working drawing for the back of the chairs for the first drawing room, 1778, as executed

Aspect

Elevation of a chair back with a central patera enclosed within an oval border of beading, and this in turn is enclosed by a band of flora. All this is set within a wreath of olive leaves surmounted by an ox mask and a tubular flower, and with an apron consisting of beading, a rosette and drop calyx enclosed within a further wreath

Scale

full size

Inscribed

The back of Chairs for the first room is the same pattern as this, but has a yellow ground as that of the bottom. in the original drawing the white and red husks were kept more apart- / Back of Chairs for the second Room at Sir A: Hume in Hill Street / 88 (pencil)

Signed and dated

  • Dec 1778
    Adelphi / 30. Dec.r 1778- / 9. Dec.r 1778 / Adelphi (cropped)

Medium and dimensions

Pencil and coloured washes including verdigris, pink and white on laid paper (381 x 531)

Hand

Possibly
Office hand, possibly Joseph Bonomi or Robert Morison

Verso

Ink stamp PAPPT 13 / (and in modern curatorial hand, pencil) vol 17 103

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 41
Harris, 1963, pp. 56, 96-97
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).