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  • image SM Adam volume 14/115

Reference number

SM Adam volume 14/115

Purpose

[9] Design for the library, 1767, executed with minor alterations

Aspect

Section of a rectangular room with a three-bay window (south) wall, apsidal ends screened by fluted Corinthian columns, and a compartmental barrel-vaulted ceiling, with two pier glasses and ornamental curtain cornices, bookcases and figurative painted panels within the apses, a frieze of lions and deer skulls, and the ceiling ornamented with a band of anthemia and tubular flowers, arabesques, medallions, and rectangular and lunette figurative panels

Scale

bar scale of 3 1/2 inches to 1 foot

Inscribed

3 Number (in pencil) / must be put his Roof here for Mr Drake (in pencil) / KENWOOD (in pencil in a modern curatorial hand)

Signed and dated

  • 1767
    datable to 1767

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and coloured washes including pink and cerulean blue on laid paper (611 x 430)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly William Hamilton

Watermark

XD&BC within cartouche

Literature

Harris, 1963, pp. 79-80
Stillman, 1966, p. 71
Beard, 1978, p. 62
Bryant, 1990, p. 18
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).