[2] Design for a ceiling for the auditorium, 1775, as executed

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Commercial buildings
  - Drury Lane Theatre, Bridges (later Catherine) Street, London: designs for interior decoration for David Garrick, 1775 (3)
    - Design and finished drawing for the ceiling of the auditorium, 1775-76, Adam volume 14/17 as executed (2)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 14/17

Purpose

[2] Design for a ceiling for the auditorium, 1775, as executed

Aspect

Plan of a tapering rhomboid ceiling, with a trompe l’oeil circular dome painted into the principal compartment, with an oval oculus, framed by bands of enclosed anthemia, and octagonal coffering enclosing rosettes, and the coffering is divided by bands of calyx and lozenges enclosing rosettes, and with oval medallions in the spandrels, and a fragmented border of rinceaux

Scale

bar scale of 2/5 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Design of a Cieling for the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane / (and in pencil) Stage Door / Roofs / [ _ _ _ _ _ ] / Ninete / [ _ _ _ _ _ _ ] and some rough calculations given

Signed and dated

19/07/1775
Adelphi July 19th: 1775. / Adelphi July

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, wash and coloured washes including Indian yellow and terre verte on laid paper (453 x 538)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly Joseph Bonomi

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 37
Stillman, 1966, p. 105
Survey of London, 1970, p. 45 and pl. 10a
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

'The Cloud-Capped Towers': Shakespeare in Soane's Architectural Imagination, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 21 April - 8 October 2016

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).