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Purpose

Design and alternative design for ornamentation of a picture frame, 1784, possibly executed (2)

Notes

These designs for frames were intended for John Singleton Copley’s ‘The Death of Major Peirson’, which John Boydell commissioned to hang in his gallery at 90 Cheapside. An account of the piece in situ is given in The Morning Herald, 6 August 1784, from which it seems likely that Adam volume 20/253 was executed. The design incorporates three oval portraits by Gilbert Stuart, depicting John Copley, James Heath, and Josiah Boydell (Boydell’s nephew and business partner). Adam volume 20/254, a simpler alternative design, incorporates Copley’s portrait only. See scheme notes.

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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 and alternative design for ornamentation of a picture frame, 1784, possibly executed (2)