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Notes
The room was probably begun in 1763 for Francis Child. The ceiling was executed with alterations to this drawing, with a different number and scale of octagonal coffers, which are painted in trompe l'oeil. The ceiling survives in situ. The arrangement shown in the drawing is closer to Robert Wood's illustration of the soffitt at the Temple of the Sun at Palmyra. Harris has suggested that another influential example for Adam's drawing room ceiling at Osterley may have been the Temple of the Sun ceiling in the nave of West Wycombe Church, painted for Sir Francis Dashwood in 1763 by Giovanni Borgnis.
There is an Adam office set of laid-out wall elevations for the drawing room within the National Trust drawings collection at Osterley.
Level
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).