Drawing Room from Lansdowne House

This room is an archetypal example of the work of Robert Adam, a Scottish architect and designer synonymous with this style of neoclassical decoration. The room originally existed on the ground floor of the grand London house that Adam designed for the third Earl of Bute in the early 1760s. Although the paintings and furniture currently on view did not furnish the room when it was in London, they were selected from the museum’s collection to reflect works popular at that time, as many British elites collected contemporary European paintings, favoring landscapes and scenes from mythology and the Bible, as well as antiquities like the ancient Greek pottery seen on the mantelpiece.