[88] Finished drawing for the ceiling for the drawing room, 1783; it is not known if this design was executed

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Town houses
  - London
    - The Adelphi, London: designs for a speculative complex built by William Adam & Co., 1768-84 (168)
      - Adam Street
        George Hesse, interior decoration and furnishings for number 1 or 2, Adam Street
        Finished drawing for the ceiling for the drawing room, 1783; it is not known if this design was executed (1)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 14/86

Purpose

[88] Finished drawing for the ceiling for the drawing room, 1783; it is not known if this design was executed

Aspect

Plan of a rectangular ceiling, with a central chimneybreast on one of the short sides, with a central medallion, encircled by a fan of enclosed anthemia, a band of Vitruvian scroll, and festoons which connect to wreaths enclosing paterae, and tablets containing winged sphinxes, and the tablets are connected by a wreath of bell flowers, and with large-scale pencil annotations showing bell flowers on the left-hand side of the sheet

Scale

bar scale of 3/5 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Design of a Ceiling for the 1st Drawing room at Mr Hesse’s House in the Adelphi (underwritten in pencil)

Signed and dated

1783
1783

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, wash and coloured washes including terre verte and violet on laid paper (564 x 414)

Hand

Adam office hand, possibly Robert Morison

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 34
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.

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