Preliminary design for the layout of the painted breakfasting parlour, with pencil annotations showing the arrangement of the ceiling, 1768, unexecuted (1)

Explore Collections

You are here: CollectionsOnline / Preliminary design for the layout of the painted breakfasting parlour, with pencil annotations showing the arrangement of the ceiling, 1768, unexecuted (1)

Browse

Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Country houses
  - Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire: designs for landscape architecture, alterations to the house, and interior design for Sir Nathaniel Curzon, 5th Baronet (created Lord Scarsdale 1761), 1759-72 (149)
    - Designs for the interior decoration and furniture including the hall, saloon, drawing room, dining room, music room, library, ante room, breakfasting parlour, staircase, state bed room, and principal dressing rooms

Purpose

Preliminary design for the layout of the painted breakfasting parlour, with pencil annotations showing the arrangement of the ceiling, 1768, unexecuted (1)

Notes

The painted breakfasting parlour was to be located on the principal floor in a small, square, one-room pavilion connected to the south-west corner of the central block, and therefore adjacent to the boudoir. The room was intended to be circular with a diameter of 25 feet.

This drawing has been incorrectly inscribed by William Adam as being for the saloon, the other circular room desgined for Kedleston, but we can see from the scale, arrangement of the niches, windows and door, as well as the pencil-drawn ceiling that it was for the painted breakfasting parlour. The design for this room has been reused from an unexecuted scheme for the circular dressing room at Harewood (1767), now demolished.

This room is often confused with the painted breakfasting room which Adam designed and executed in the family pavilion. This was a rectangular room, and drawings for it in the hand of Agostino Brunias survive in the Kedleston drawings collecion. It was dismantled in 1807.

Level

Group

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 Preliminary design for the layout of the painted breakfasting parlour, with pencil annotations showing the arrangement of the ceiling, 1768, unexecuted (1)

[134] Preliminary design for the layout of the painted breakfasting parlour, with pencil annotations showing the arrangement of the ceiling, 1768, unexecuted