Variant rough preliminary designs and finished drawing for a chimneypiece for Lord Mansfield's dressing room, 1779, executed with alterations (3)

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Country houses
  - Kenwood, Hampstead, London: designs for the house and park for William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, 1764-83 (55)
    - House and interior

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Variant rough preliminary designs and finished drawing for a chimneypiece for Lord Mansfield's dressing room, 1779, executed with alterations (3)

Notes

Lord Mansfield's dressing room, originally the first drawing room, is located on the ground floor, on the south front of the central block, and was redecorated by Adam immediately after the main reception rooms.

Although Adam volume 23/234 is inscribed as being for the library, all three drawings clearly relate to one another, and to the executed chimneypiece in Lord Mansfield's dressing room. In the executed version the entablature of the pilasters is moved down, effectively becoming applied ornament along the stile, and with the rosette from Adam volume 24/182. The frieze has the same tablet as Adam volumes 23/131 and 24/182, and the ox skull and festoon motifs of Adam volume 24/182. This possibly misleading inscription on Adam volume 23/234 suggests that Lord Mansfield had used his dressing room to store books prior to the construction of the new library wing at Kenwood.

A twentieth-century reproduction of this chimneypiece is to be found in Lady Mansfield's sitting-cum-dressing room, albeit without the rosettes.

There is no documentary evidence that the chair in Adam volume 24/182 was at Kenwood. Julius Bryant has noted that this chair does not correlate with Adam's typical style, and therefore may be a sketch of a chair which Adam had seen and wanted to record.

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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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Contents of Variant rough preliminary designs and finished drawing for a chimneypiece for Lord Mansfield's dressing room, 1779, executed with alterations (3)