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Preliminary designs and finished drawings for items of furniture for unknown locations, 1770-83, executed status unknown (5)

Notes

It is not known if the following designs were executed, and their intended locations are also unknown.

Of Adam volume 20/78 Eileen Harris wrote, ‘One of Adam’s few [furniture] designs for William Weddell who obtained a great deal of his furniture for Newby from France. The exaggerated height of the glass (according to the scale approximately 8ft x 2ft 6in), and the style of the frame, which is closer to Adam’s work of c1765-66 (a period of French influence) than of 1770, may be concessions to Weddell’s Gallic tastes.'

The rough preliminary design for wall or door panels (Adam volume 52/64) has drawn on the verso a rough plan of a circular room with four apses. Although this was an arrangement which Adam used on several occasions, in this instance it may allude to the gallery at Newby. As such, the decorative panels on the recto may be early designs for the wall panels in the sculpture gallery. However, they do not match the executed ornamentation to the walls, and this is mere speculation.

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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).  


Contents of Preliminary designs and finished drawings for items of furniture for unknown locations, 1770-83, executed status unknown (5)