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  • image SM Adam volume 52/137

Reference number

SM Adam volume 52/137

Purpose

[9] Preliminary design showing the second scheme for the ceiling for the circular room, 1774, unexecuted

Aspect

Rough plan of a circular ceiling, with a central medallion, enclosed within circular frames of fluting, a fan of alternating anthemia and calyx, winged griffons and oxen, and Etruscan-style foliage, all set within a shaped octagon, ornamented with naturalistic anthemia, with an enclosed rosette on each side, set within a wreath of bell flowers, and connected together by a large circular frame of bell flowers, and each is supporting a figurative tablet, and on each point of the octagon is an enclosed anthemion, connecting with a segmental compartment containing a segmental patera, enclosed within a fan ornamented with calyx

Scale

not to scale

Inscribed

Grey / Green / Dark / Dark / Grey / Dark / Grey / Yellw / Yellw / Green / Cornice (all in pencil)

Signed and dated

  • 1774
    datable to 1774

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, wash and coloured washes including sepia and cerulean blue on laid paper (453 x 309)

Hand

Robert Adam

Literature

King, 2001, Volume II, p. 134
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

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).