The entrance halls of houses designed by Robert Adam tend towards the heroic and Harewood is no exception.
As Adam conceived it, the Hall was a noble ante-chamber rather than a place in which to linger, but the inventory made in 1795 suggests that 25 years after the house was first occupied it was already used as something like an extra sitting room. Certainly that was how the Victorians employed it, and by the end of the 19th century photographs show it heavily furnished.
The whole space is now dominated by a sculpture that is the most important twentieth century addition to Harewoods' collections, Jacob Epstein's Adam.
