Browse
Purpose
Notes
This design was not executed at number 4 Royal Terrace, and instead a marble chimneypiece was installed in the room, which was executed with minor alterations to a design which had been made for the front drawing room of number 3 Royal Terrace (Adam volume 24/33), with a fluted frieze rather than the anthemia and arabesques shown in the drawing. It survived to be photographed by the LCC in 1936 and was sold at auction in the same year. This design is a close variant copy of that designed by Adam in 1769 for the front drawing room at number 25 Grosvenor Square (Adam volume 22/264).
The ceiling in the front drawing room was executed to a close variant of a design intended for the front drawing room at number 7 Royal Terrace (Adam volume 13/33), and was inset with paintings by Antonio Zucchi, four of which were sold at Sotheby’s on 16 October 1993. The ceiling survived to be photographed by the LCC in 1936.
Level
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).