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Design and alternative finished drawing for a sofa, and finished drawing for a chair, for the drawing room, 1762, sofa executed with alterations and delivered in 1762 (3)

Though produced by John Linnell, these drawings were signed off by Robert Adam. Adam took no part in the design of the sofas, but according to Harris his influence can be detected in the ornamental motifs: ‘the gadrooned seat rail, the shape of the back, the medallion credit, and the use of mermaids and tritons as arm supports’. Horace Walpole thought the sofa 'absurdly like' the coronation coach of George III, and there are indeed similarities between the executed sofas and this magnificent vehicle. The sofas took three years to make and were delivered to Kedleston in 1765. There are two 13-foot long sofas made with merfolk arms to stand either side of the chimneypiece, and two 12-foot long sofas with triton and sea nymph arms to stand against the end (north and south) walls. Hardy and Hayward suggest that these were possibly the grandest sofas made in Britain during the eighteenth century.

The nautical theme of the sofas is continued in the blue damask upholstery, walls and of the sofas, walls and curtains. The original blue damask was removed in 1906, but it was rewoven by the National Trust and installed in 2006 in memory of John Cornforth. An unexecuted design for a painted ceiling on a nautical theme survives amongst the drawings at Kedleston, and according to Harris the nautical theme of the room 'celebrates Britain's "Year of Victories" at sea in 1759 and George III's accession in 1760 as 'Monarch of the Ocean', which brought Curzon his long-awaited peerage'. The sofa's merfolk supporters themselves are related to those in William Chambers’ Treatise on civil architecture (1759).

The executed sofas vary slightly from Linnell’s drawings at the Soane Museum, and are more closely related to the drawings in the Kedleston drawings collection and at the V&A. There are five Linnell drawings for this sofa in the V&A: three preliminary designs and two finished drawings. The same design was used for Mrs Montagu’s sofas in her house on Portman Square, and one of these survives in the possession of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
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