[13] Design for an overmantel mirror frame for the first drawing room, 1779, possibly executed

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Town houses
  - London
    - Hill Street, number 31 (later 17), London, designs for a rear elevation, interiors and furniture, for Sir Abraham Hume, 1778-1780 (64)
      - Design for an overmantel mirror frame for the first drawing room, 1779, possibly executed (1)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 20/203

Purpose

[13] Design for an overmantel mirror frame for the first drawing room, 1779, possibly executed

Aspect

Elevation of a tripartite, overmantel mirror frame with a base formed by paired pedestals, ornamented with ram masks and paterae enclosed within fans, and supporting winged sphinxes bearing candelabra. Between the pedestals, there is a band of rosettes with an apron of beading, forming festoons. The frame has paired Ionic pilaster stiles, and capitals containing rosettes, and with a band of fluting above. The central compartment has a frieze of enclosed anthemia, and a central cameo draped by festoons. The frame is surmounted by a basket flanked by putti and corner urns

Scale

bar scale of 1 ½ inches to 1 foot

Inscribed

Glass frame over Chimney Piece in first room at Sir Abraham Hume’s in Hill Street / 203

Signed and dated

Jan 1779
Adelphi / 11. Janry 1779

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and coloured washes including Indian yellow, cerulean blue and pink on laid paper (256 x 498)

Hand

Possibly
Office hand, possibly Joseph Bonomi or Robert Morison

Watermark

JWHATMAN

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 40
Harris, 1963, p. 56
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

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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