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Notes
It is not known if this design was executed as there is no known photographic record of the chimneypiece prior to demolition, and there is a modern chimneypiece listed in this room in the auction inventory: ‘A modern painted pine chimneypiece, with fluted frieze with 2 oval medallions of dancing children and 4 oval paterae, the centre panel with urns and husk festoons, each jamb composed of a pair of Corinthian columns.’
This design is a duplicate of that designed by Adam in 1769 for the drawing room at Blunham House (Adam volume 22/269). The Blunham House design is inscribed in pencil with the words, River front / Front Parlor / 5t House, corresponding with the intended location of this design.
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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.
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).