Preliminary design, finished drawing and record drawings for ceiling and walls for the great dining room, ceiling as executed, and walls presumed to have been executed, August 1780 (5)

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
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    - Cumberland House, 86 Pall Mall, London: designs for the interior, and additions to the house for the Duke of Cumberland, August 1780 - January 1788 (69)
      - Designs for the interior decoration, including the great dining room, music room, eating room, drawing rooms and boudoir (59)

Purpose

Preliminary design, finished drawing and record drawings for ceiling and walls for the great dining room, ceiling as executed, and walls presumed to have been executed, August 1780 (5)

Notes

The great dining room was created in 1781 by knocking together two smaller rooms on the parlour (ground) floor on the south front of the house. There is photographic proof that Adam's ceiling was executed in this room, and therefore, presumably so too were the designs for the walls. There was no sign of this interior decorative scheme in the early twentieth century when the house was demolished.

The room was designed in the Etruscan style, along the lines of Adam's other Etruscan rooms, such as the dressing room at Osterley, but according to Stillman this was 'among the largest and most imposing rooms designed by Adam in the Etruscan fashion'. Moreover, the various drawings for this room show Adam's ability to design a harmonious ensemble, taking into account every aspect of a room.

There are various motifs in the preliminary design for the ceiling (Adam volume 5/33) which were omitted in the executed finished drawing (Adam volume 14/79). These motifs, however, found their way into the carpet design for the room (Adam volume 17/207).

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

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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 Preliminary design, finished drawing and record drawings for ceiling and walls for the great dining room, ceiling as executed, and walls presumed to have been executed, August 1780 (5)