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  • image SM Adam volume 50/68

Reference number

SM Adam volume 50/68

Purpose

[1] Design for the interior decoration of the great drawing room, 1768, as executed with alterations

Aspect

Laid out wall elevations of a double-cube drawing room, including the cove. The cove is decorated with winged sphinxes and arabesques, the cornice with fluting and egg and dart, and the frieze with anthemia. The north wall contains three windows, the central a Venetian, separated by mirrors; the curtains are drawn up into cornices decorated with calyx. The other walls, with one door each in the east and west and two in the south, are decorated with paintings in gilded frames. The chimneypiece, doors and windows share the same format of Spalatro order pilasters, and friezes of alternating anthemia and calyx; the chimneypiece also has a tablet containing a tazza flanked by arabesques. The mirror frames on the west side are ovals suspended from animal masks, decorated with festoons held by terms; those on the east are plain rectangles

Scale

bar scale of 1/3 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Section of the Great Drawing Room at Saltram / Complete at Saltram (verso) John Parker Esqr Saltram

Signed and dated

  • 1768
    datable to 1768

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and coloured washes of pink and cerulean blue on laid paper (613 x 859)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly Joseph Bonomi

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 27
D. Stillman, 1966, pp. 80-1
Harris, 2001, pp. 234, 236
For full literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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.

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