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Rough preliminary designs, designs, finished drawing and record drawings for a harpsichord case, 1774, unexecuted (7)

Signed and dated

  • 1774

Notes

The rough preliminary designs, and the isometric drawing (Adam volumes 52/7, 6/127, 25/9) show different designs to the others.

The finished and record drawings are colour-washed and suggest the use of painted ornament on the harpsichord case. The instrument illustrated in the Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam, however, is said to be inlaid with coloured woods.

None of these designs were brought to fruition, although an instrument decorated to a much altered scheme was executed, and survives in the boudoir of Maria Feodorovna, Grand Duke Paul's second wife, at the Palace of Pavlovsk (see scheme notes).

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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).  


Contents of Rough preliminary designs, designs, finished drawing and record drawings for a harpsichord case, 1774, unexecuted (7)