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Alternative preliminary designs and finished drawing for the great drawing room chimneypiece, 1773, Adam volume 23/49 as executed (3)

Notes

The great drawing room chimneypiece is included twice in the second volume of The works in architecture of Robert and James Adam (part 1, plate 5 and 6). Plate 5 is an Inside View of the Third and Great Withdrawing-room, and includes the chimneypiece as executed, and in accordance with Adam volume 23/49. The second time it is shown in the Works in plate 6: Two Chimney-pieces: in the Great Withdrawing-room, and the Countess of Derby's Dressing-room, and this is a variant design which was not executed.

This chimneypiece is one of few items from 23 Grosvenor Square to have survived, and is now in the English Speaking Union, Charles Street. There is no extant drawing showing the published design for the overmantel mirror frame, and this feature is not known to have survived.

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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 Alternative preliminary designs and finished drawing for the great drawing room chimneypiece, 1773, Adam volume 23/49 as executed (3)