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Design showing laid out wall elevations for the entrance hall, c1770-78, executed with minor alterations (1)

Signed and dated

  • c1770-78
    date range: 1770-78

Notes

The entrance hall is located on the principal storey of Robert Adam's central block, in a three-bay projection at the centre of the principal (north) front, adjacent to the staircase, with the dining room (later the music room) beyond. It is a large rectangular room with apsidal ends. Unusually for Adam, this is the only room at Mellerstain which is not a basic rectangular shape.

More typically of Adam, this hall makes use of a masculine and martial decorative scheme. Stillman has noted the use of an enriched Doric frieze - although there are no Doric orders here - with ornamentation in the metopes, similar to that found in Adam's halls at Newby Hall, Harewood House and Mersham-le-Hatch.

Adam's laid out wall elevations for the entrance hall (Adam volume 43/45) includes a chimneypiece, which survives in situ, and sculpture-filled niches in the apses. However it is not known of the sculptures were ever provided for these niches.

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Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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.

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Contents of Design showing laid out wall elevations for the entrance hall, c1770-78, executed with minor alterations (1)