Robert Adam & his brothers; their lives, work & influence on English architecture, decoration and furniture . rdetails, such as ceilings and chimney-pieces ; yet all this was beforeRobert Adam had been in England two years, after his returnfrom the Continent. Among the drawings of ceilings designed in1759, there is one for General Bland at Isleworth and another forAdmiral Boscawen, for whom a chimney-piece was also designedat the same time. These are the earliest designs of the kind thatRobert Adam prepared, and, like the early work of many otherarchitects, they differ in the style of their tr
Robert Adam & his brothers; their lives, work & influence on English architecture, decoration and furniture . rdetails, such as ceilings and chimney-pieces ; yet all this was beforeRobert Adam had been in England two years, after his returnfrom the Continent. Among the drawings of ceilings designed in1759, there is one for General Bland at Isleworth and another forAdmiral Boscawen, for whom a chimney-piece was also designedat the same time. These are the earliest designs of the kind thatRobert Adam prepared, and, like the early work of many otherarchitects, they differ in the style of their treatment from later , for instance, Figs. 48 and 49; Figs. 83 and 84. Adams earlydesigns for ceilings were of a more massive type than that whichhe subsequently adopted. In the eleventh volume of the AdamSeries, in the Soane Collection, this development of his treatmentcan be readily perceived. At first comparatively massive features,not unlike some of those to be found in the work of his father,preceded the festoons, graceful spirals and other details that he THE EARLY WORK OF ROBERT ADAM 107. Fig. 85.—The Library, Kedleston. ioS THE LIVES AND WORK OF ROBERT AND JAMES ADAM subsequently introduced. Compare, for instance, the ceiling forAdmiral Boscawen in 1759, the ceiling for the Drawing-Room atKedleston in 1760 (Fig. 78), and the work for the Duke of North- umberland at Syon dated1761 (, 113), withthe design , which showsthe scheme pro-posed for theCeiling forLady Coven-trys OctagonDressing-Roomin Piccadilly,dated 1765. Inthe last-men-tioned design,the spirit ofgaiety, grace,and delicaterefinement areevident, andreplace theseverity andmore masculinecharacter of thetreatments ofearlier is, nevertheless, only one of many comparisons that might bemade, in order to show that Robert Adams ultimate manner didnot fully assert itself immediately after his return from the ContinentAlthough the screen in front of the Admiralty Building in White
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, booksub, booksubjectarchitecture
