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Notes
It is not known if this design was executed at number 4 Adam Street as there is no known photographic record of the chimneypiece prior to demolition.
This design is a close variant copy of that designed by Adam in c1767 for the drawing room at Fort George. The Fort George design is inscribed in pencil with the words, 4t House D[urham] Y[ard], corresponding with the intended location of this design.
The drawing is inscribed to tell us that the design was also intended for the back drawing room at 4 Royal Terrace. It was not executed in that room, and instead a design was used for which there is no drawing, with volute stiles, enclosed masks in the capitals, a fluted frieze, and a tablet containing an urn surmounted by sphinxes. It survived to be photographed by the LCC in 1936.
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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).