Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Sackville Street, number 29, London: executed design for the ceiling for the drawing room, for John Parker, 1770 (3)

Browse

Purpose

Sackville Street, number 29, London: executed design for the ceiling for the drawing room, for John Parker, 1770 (3)

Signed and dated

  • 1770

Notes

The four-storey house at 29 Sackville Street was built for the barrister William East in 1732 under his direct surveillance. John Parker was already living on the street at number 16 when he bought number 29 and moved there in 1770. There is no evidence for Adam doing any work beyond the drawing room ceiling on the first floor, but it is nevertheless a prominent commission, the drawing room taking up the house's whole street frontage of 31 feet.

As of 1922, when the building served the new Victorian Club, the ceiling existed 'exact as drawing'. However, the house was damaged by fire, and Adam's ceiling lost its painted elements. Since 1985 the rest of the ceiling has been restored, and the house was sold in 1994 as offices.

See also: Saltram Park, Devon

Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 49; F.H.W. Sheppard ed., Survey of London XXXII, The Parish of St James Westminster II North of Piccadilly, 1963, pp.360-1; D. King, The Complete Works of Robert & James Adam and Unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume 1, p.314; S. Bradley and N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England: London 6: Westminster, 2003, p.567

Max Bryant, 2012

Level

Scheme

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).  


Contents of Sackville Street, number 29, London: executed design for the ceiling for the drawing room, for John Parker, 1770 (3)