[2] Finished drawing for a ceiling for the first drawing room, 1771, as executed

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Town houses
  - London
    - Chandos House, Queen Anne Street, number 1 (now number 2), London: designs for interior decoration, built and decorated as a speculation by Robert and James Adam, 1769-72 (8)
      - Preliminary design and finished drawing for a ceiling for the first drawing room, 1771, as executed (2)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 13/55

Purpose

[2] Finished drawing for a ceiling for the first drawing room, 1771, as executed

Aspect

Plan of a tripartite, rectangular ceiling, divided by bands of guilloche, with cross-shaped compartments of enclosed rosettes and anthemia at each corner, and with an outer border of Vitruvian scroll. The central square compartment has a central medallion within a fluted frame, encircled by bows and festoons, and connected by bows and ribbons to peltoid shields and drops of calyx, all contained within an x-shaped arrangement of beading, and with a segmental compartment on each side containing a tazza supported by rinceaux. The central square is flanked by rectangular compartments containing a central oval medallion, within a fluted frame, encircled by four anthemia, a lozenge-shaped frame, and festoons, and flanked by urns, arabesques, and anthemia

Scale

bar scale of 3/5 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Cieling of the 1st. Drawing room at Chandos House

Signed and dated

1771
1771.

Medium and dimensions

Pen, wash and coloured washes including pink and verdigris on laid paper (607 x 452)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly Joseph Bonomi

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 36
Lees Milne, 1947, p. 121
Stillman, 1966, p. 102
Rowan, 2003, p. 59
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

'Bob the Roman': Heroic Antiquity and the Architecture of Robert Adam, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 27 June - 27 September 2003; New York School of Interior Design Gallery, 29 September - 4 December 2004
Robert Adam's London, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 30 November 2016 - 11 March 2017

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).