[55] Design for a pier glass and table frame for the great drawing room, 1779

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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 a pier glass and table frame for the great drawing room, 1779 (1)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 20/206

Purpose

[55] Design for a pier glass and table frame for the great drawing room, 1779

Aspect

Elevation of a pier table, with tapering legs and turned feet, and a lower rail which supports an urn. The capitals contain calyx and there is a frieze of patera, with a central tablet ornamented with a festoon and rosette. All this is surmounted by a pier glass frame ornamented with a central tripod in relief. The tripod has sabre legs and paw feet, is ornamented with ram masks, has an apron of anthemia, calyx and flora, and is surmounted by an urn bearing three candle branches. Behind this there is a band of enclosed rosettes and thyrsi, with festoons of ribbons and beading. The frame is ornamented with bands of enclosed anthemia and rope moulding, and is surmounted by a figurative roundel, with an urn ornamented with gadrooning and ram masks above. This is flanked by draped figures bearing festoons of husks To the right - Side-elevation of the pier glass frame and table, with a candelabrum ornamented with gadrooning and festoons

Scale

bar scale of 1 ½ inches to 1 foot

Inscribed

Pier Glass & Table frame for the Great drawing room at Sir Abraham Hume’s in Hill Street / 206 and some dimensions given

Signed and dated

March 1779
Adelphi / 17 March / 1779

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and coloured washes including Indian yellow and cerulean blue on laid paper (309 x 510)

Hand

Possibly
Office hand, possibly Joseph Bonomi or Robert Morison

Watermark

GR surmounted by a fleur-de-lis within a crowned cartouche

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 40
Harris, 1963, pp. 56, 85
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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