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Designs for a chimneypiece for the great dining room (now the saloon and picture gallery), executed with minor alterations, 1759 (2)

These designs had minor alterations in execution. Additional ornamented was added to the frieze, the subject of the tablet changed, and caryatids - now figures of Night and Morning - have more full drapery.

This caryatid chimneypiece is of the type used by Adam prior to his Grand Tour in the Red Drawing Room at Hopetoun House. He continued to use it in other early projects: Croome Court, Harewood House and Kedleston Hall. The sculptor was probably Michael Rysbrack (1694-1770) who had been responsible for the caryatid chimneypiece at Hopetoun (1756-58), and two years later was to carve Admiral Boscawen's funerary monument.

Sources for the caryatid chimneypiece can be found in the second quarter of the eighteenth century; Stillman cites Isaac Ware's caryatid chimneypiece for Chesterfield House as a good example. The Chesterfield House caryatid chimneypiece was illustrated in Ware's Complete Body of Architecture (1756), a copy of which was in the Adam family's possession.
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