[21] Design for a five-bay front elevation

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Town houses
  - Glasgow: 6 Buchanan Street for Robert Dennistoun, 1798-1800 (35)
    - Alternative design for a larger house

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Reference number

SM 2/8/12

Purpose

[21] Design for a five-bay front elevation

Aspect

Front elevation

Scale

bar scale of ¼ inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Robert Dennistoun Esq^re, Joist (twice), Sunk Floor, and a few vertical dimensions given

Signed and dated

00/01/1799
Copy Jan^y 1799

Medium and dimensions

Pen and sepia wash, shaded on wove paper (342 x 560)

Hand

Attributed to Henry Hake Seward (1778 - 1848)
Pupil and assistant May 1794 - September 1808. Nothing in the Soane office Day Book for January 1799.

Notes

The almost fifteen foot wide passageways to each side of the house may have seemed a waste of space to Soane. It did allow for accommodating useful services such as scullery, boots and knives room etc as well as a footpath to the garden behind the house. Borrowing only three feet from each side, a new five-bay design was made that would probably have had much the same plan but with more window to wall and a striking skyline finish of three plinths with Greek or Roman ornament, two in the form of a shallow urn or 'kylix' with drapery. The urns give sculptural relief to a front that apart from a dozen small discs appears as pleasingly severe.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Alexander Thomson: The Unknown Genius, The Lighthouse, Glasgow, 25 June - 23 September 1999

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.

Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).