[5] Design for the library, c1770, executed with minor alterations

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Country houses
  - Mellerstain, Earlston, Scottish Borders: designs for the house, interiors, and an unexecuted memorial tower for the Hon. George Baillie, c1768-78 (19)
    - Design showing laid out wall elevations for the library, 1770, executed with minor alterations (1)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 43/44

Purpose

[5] Design for the library, c1770, executed with minor alterations

Aspect

Plan and laid out wall elevations of a five- by three-bay library, with five windows on one wall, with furniture on the piers, each ornamented with an oval compartment, and surmounted by a roundel on the wall, and the opposite wall has a central chimneypiece, surmounted by a rectangular overmantel frame, and flanked by tripartite bookcases, surmounted by rectangular compartments, and flanked by doors, with pilaster architraves, and surmounted by roundel overdoors, and on each of the end walls is another tripartite bookcase, surmounted by rectangular compartments, and flanked by doors with roundel overdoors, and with a frieze of alternating anthemia and anthemia enclosed within scrolled hearts

Scale

bar scale of 2/5 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Design for Finishing the Library at Mellerstain for The Honble George Baillie / Dark Pink / Light Green / Dark green / Bust / Picture and some measurements given, and some rough calculations in pencil

Signed and dated

1770
datable to 1770

Medium and dimensions

Pen and pencil on laid paper (906 x 642)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly William Hamilton or Joseph Bonomi

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 22
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).