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Notes
This design is not known to have been executed at number 5 Adam Street, and instead was installed in the library (later the dining room) at number 5 Royal Terrace, survived to be photographed by the LCC in 1936, and was sold at auction in the same year.
The inscription on this drawing: River Front / and for the Back / Room 1 pr Stairs / 6t. House suggests that the design was intended to be duplicated in the back first-floor room at number 5 Royal Terrace. This was not the case and the chimneypiece in that room was executed to a design which was originally intended for the back drawing room at number 1 Royal Terrace (Adam volume 24/26).
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).