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Notes
This room is the most ambitious Adam interior at Ugbrooke, but it is still severe when compared with other Adam interiors of the 1760s.
The library is included within a projecting wing on the south-east corner of the house, which attaches the chapel to the house. Eighteenth-century law prohibited the existence of freestanding Catholic churches, and as such it was necessary for Adam to incorporate the library into the chapel wing.
The library was not executed to the design of Adam volume 50/46, and although the central location of the chimneypiece was retained, it is not flanked by doors. Moreover, the doors in the side walls are central, the window wall is canted, and the arrangement and ornamentation of the bookcases is entirely different to the drawing.
The room was restored in the 1990s, and Adam's original green colour scheme was reinstated.
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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.
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).