[20] Preliminary design for a ceiling for the great drawing room, 1773

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Town houses
  - London
    - Grosvenor Square, number 23 (number 26 from 1862), London: designs for interior decoration and furnishings for Lord Edward Stanley, (later 12th Earl of Derby), 1773-75 (94)
      - Preliminary design and finished drawing for the great drawing room ceiling, 1773, as executed (2)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 52/145

Purpose

[20] Preliminary design for a ceiling for the great drawing room, 1773

Aspect

Plan of a rectangular groin-vaulted ceiling, with a central medallion, enclosed within a frame of Vitruvian scroll, encircled by four anthemia, and set within a square frame of rinceaux, with a segmental compartment on each side, containing a rosette, enclosed within a fan, and within a border of connected enclosed anthemia, and in each corner is a square medallion, surmounted by arabesques and anthemia and with a border of calyx and the whole is set within a square frame of connected enclosed rosettes, and the ceiling has a compartmental border, with rosettes enclosed within fans in the corners, and the sides contain oval medallions, compartments of urns and rinceaux, and central miniature rosettes enclosed within fans

Scale

not to scale

Inscribed

Design of Groin for / Lord Stanleys front Drawing / Room

Signed and dated

1773
datable to 1773

Medium and dimensions

Pencil on sugar paper (354 x 306)

Hand

Robert Adam

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 38
Harris, 2001, p. 363
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

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.

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