[1] Finished drawing for the library, 1764, unexecuted

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Country houses
  - Kenwood, Hampstead, London: designs for the house and park for William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, 1764-83 (55)
    - House and interior
      - Finished drawings for the library, 1764, unexecuted (2)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 43/3

Purpose

[1] Finished drawing for the library, 1764, unexecuted

Aspect

Section through a rectangular room with a three-bay chimney (north) wall, compartmental segmental vaulted ceiling, and three-bay apsidal ends, and with a small ante room to the left-hand side containing a sculpture-filled niche. The central bay contains a caryatid chimneypiece and rectangular figurative overmantel within a relieving arch. Each bay is articulated by a relieving arch, and the chimneypiece is flanked by bays containing bookcases surmounted by busts and urns. The ceiling is ornamented with arabesque and figurative panels and medallions

Scale

bar scale of 3 inches to 10 feet

Inscribed

Design for finishing one side of the Library for Kenwood House in Middlesex. The Seat of The Right Honble Lord Mansfield (verso) 3 / 3

Signed and dated

1764
James Adam Archt 1764

Medium and dimensions

Pen, wash and pink and Naples yellow washes within a single ruled border on laid paper (892 x 361)

Hand

James Adam

Watermark

IHS IVILLEDARY and LVG surmounted by fleur-de-lis within crowned cartouche

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 19
Stillman, 1966, p. 71
Bryant, 1990, p. 18
King, 2001, Volume I, p. 119
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Original Drawings of Robert and James Adam, Kenwood House, London, 1953

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).