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Notes
The use of mirrors within the space is significant, with Tait making comparison to the glass drawing room at Northumberland House. Here we again see the importance of light in a space intended for evening entertainment. The mirrored pilasters were designed combined with the appliqué candelabra ornaments in order to reflect the candle light. Unfortunately the mirrors do not survive and the pilasters were altered at a later date with their pedestals and ormolu ornamentation and candelabra removed.
Bolton notes drastic alteration to the window apses, with a later attempt to widen the space, and the chimneypiece does not survive. Harris notes the popingjays included in Adam’s design for the chimneypiece and their significance as heraldic emblems for the Home family.
The intended centrepiece of the music room was the organ, which Harris notes was designed with its painted cladding to form a fixture of the room. The organ does not survive. King notes that an organ was recorded here in the accounts of 1796-7. The accounts record that repairs to the organ included £6 -6s-0d for work on the inlay and varnishing. As a result King suggests this does not fit with the scheme of painted decoration shown in Adam’s variant designs, and therefore it might not have been executed. Harris, however, argues Adam’s execution of an organ which formed a fixture within the room is evident from the reproduction frieze inserted in its recess. She argues that as the instrument was an integral part of the overall design the wall behind the organ was left blank, and therefore the plasterwork required alteration when the organ was removed.
During the recent restoration, a two year project was undertaken to recreate the organ to one of the variant Adam designs, although the finished piece does not function as an instrument but as a drinks cabinet.
Level
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).
Contents of Finished drawings for the music room, 1775, as executed (4)
- [26] Finished drawing for the north wall of the music room, 1775, as executed
- [27] Finished drawing for the east wall of the music room, 1775, as executed
- [28] Finished drawing for the south wall of the music room, 1775, as executed
- [29] Finished drawing for the west wall of the music room, 1775, as executed