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  • image SM Adam volume 12/158
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Reference number

SM Adam volume 12/158

Purpose

[12] Finished drawing for the ceiling of the private dressing room, 1774, unexecuted

Aspect

Plan of a rectangular barrel vaulted ceiling, with apsidal ends, divided by bands of scrolled hearts, with segmental paterae in the apses, enclosed within a frame of guilloche, a fan ornamented with anthemia, and festoons supporting five cameos. The central barrel vault is ornamented with a central medallion enclosed within circular frames of beading and Vitruvian scroll, and a fan, and set within a square frame, with a segmental figurative tablet on each side, and an enclosed rosette in each corner. To each side of this square are aprons of festoons hung from bows, supporting wreaths, a medallion flanked by figurative tables and peltoid shields above a pair of winged sphinxes. All of this is flanked by rectangular borders ornamented with alternating squares containing enclosed rosettes, and rectangles containing figurative tablets, flanked by segmental rosettes enclosed within fans of fluting, and these squares and rectangles in the borders are divided by bands of calyx (verso) pencil-drawn design for an alternative ceiling

Scale

bar scale of 3/5 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Design of a Cieling for General Fitzroy

Signed and dated

  • 1774
    1774

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, wash and coloured washes of olive green and terre verte on laid paper (435 x 382)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly William Hamilton or Joseph Bonomi

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).