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  • image SM Adam volume 25/8

Reference number

SM Adam volume 25/8

Purpose

[5] Finished drawing showing plans and an elevation of a harpsichord case, 1774, unexecuted

Aspect

Plan, elevation and profile. The plan shows the arrangement of eight legs, and the elevations show that the base of the instrument is ornamented with cable moulding, the legs with drops of calyx, swags and surmounted by enclosed rosettes, and the sides of the instrument are ornamented with cable moulding, griffons, half figures, arabesques, oval figurative panels, a centally placed urn, and a band of anthemia and calyx

Scale

bar scale of 1 1/2 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Harpsichord for The Empress of Russia

Signed and dated

  • 1774
    1774

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, wash and coloured washes including pink, cerulean blue and Indian yellow on laid paper (405 x 585)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly Joseph Bonomi

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 57
King, 2001, Volume II, p. 257
Libin, 2001, pp. 355, 360
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Original Drawings of Robert and James Adam, Kenwood House, London, 1953

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).