Neither the house, nor any photographic evidence of Adam’s interiors at Langford House survives. The first-floor drawing rooms – front and back – are known to have been decorated in accordance with designs by Adam, and it is assumed that this work corresponded with the extant drawings.

The back drawing room was located at the back of the house, on the first storey. We can see from the inscription on the ceiling design (Adam volume 11/123) that Adam called this the ‘great room’.

Adam’s design for the ceiling for the back drawing room was reproduced in the drawing room – later the Chinese Room – for Hercules Rowley and Viscountess Langford’s daughter and son-in-law, the 1st Earl and Countess of Bective, at Headfort House, County Meath. Adam’s finished drawing for the ceiling was found within the collection at Headfort in 1936, and is now within the Yale Center for British Art at New Haven, among twenty other Adam drawings for Headfort itself. The ceiling at Headfort survives, although that in Langford House was lost when the building was demolished in the early twentieth century.

Group

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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