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Notes
In a letter written by Garrick we know that Andrew Beckett, a bookseller in the Strand, took the north-east corner house of Adam Street. The exact location of this house is not clear as the building on the north-east corner of the Strand and Adam Street is far too small to have contained the ceilings which Adam designed for Mr Beckett. The house in question may have been number 11 Adam Street, which is the most north-easterly of the houses in that terrace.
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).
Contents of Number unknown, Adam Street: Mr Beckett's house
- Design for the ceiling for the front drawing room, 1773; it is not known if this design was executed (1)
- Design for a ceiling for the back drawing room or dining room, 1773; it is not known if this design was executed (1)