Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Possibly unfinished record drawing of a half-circle ceiling design showing three radiating bands. The outer band has panels with deer either side of an anthemion; the second band has panels with griffins on either side of a figure; the third band has rosettes and arabesques.
  • image Adam vol.26/94
Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image
Print this image in A4 view  (icon indicating printer link)

Reference number

Adam vol.26/94

Purpose

Possibly unfinished record drawing of a half-circle ceiling design showing three radiating bands. The outer band has panels with deer either side of an anthemion; the second band has panels with griffins on either side of a figure; the third band has rosettes and arabesques.

Aspect

Ceiling plan

Signed and dated

  • Undated, probably 1760 - 63

Medium and dimensions

Pen, watercolour 400 x 634, foldline

Hand

Giuseppe Manocchi

Notes

This is a companion to Adam vol.26/93 and is in Giuseppe Manocchi (c.1731-82)'s hand. Both are watercolours that are more typical of those found in the Manocchi drawings in Adam volumes 15 and 16. This drawing may also be compared with a watercolour amongst the drawings by Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721-1820) in Box E in the Hermitage, St Petersburg, Russia (1861) with a source in Empress Livia's apartments on the Palatine, Rome (see Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721-1820) Dessins du musée de l'Ermitage Saint-Petersbourg, catalogue of an exhibition held at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, 1995, p.100).
It is possible that this is one of the three ceilings from 'Livia's Baths' that James Adam referred to in 1762 as '... painted and so pretty and so rare that I thought I could not have them done with too much care' (J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh and Rome, London, 1962, p.371). There is another drawing of one of the ceilings in Adam vol.26/169.

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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).