Record drawings for the great staircase, 1761, executed with a upper balcony and the cove removed (2)

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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

Record drawings for the great staircase, 1761, executed with a upper balcony and the cove removed (2)

Notes

The great staircase is located in the west of the hall and saloon in the central block, adjacent to the state bed room.

These drawings show that the staircase was originally intended to reach only as far as the principal floor, but prior to execution it was decided to extend the staircase to the semi-state guest rooms on the upper floor, rather than requiring guests to use the adjacent backstairs. A landing was added at the upper level of the stairwell so as to remove the need for a corridor which would encroach upon the rooms beyond, but this left no space for the coved ceiling that can be seen in these drawings and it was not executed. Alternative drawings for the plasterwork ornamentation were made, but this was not executed until 1923-24.

There is a duplicate of Adam volume 40/25 in the Kedleston drawings collection.

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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).

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Contents of Record drawings for the great staircase, 1761, executed with a upper balcony and the cove removed (2)