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Purpose

Sketch survey drawings, September 1804 (46)

Aspect

46 pages of survey drawings (plus some un-numbered pages) in one volume (88)

Inscribed

(on front cover) The Lord Eliot, Port Eliot / Cornwall / Sketches of the House, Church etc / Sept. 1804

Signed and dated

  • 00/09/1804

Medium and dimensions

46 pages (plus some un-used pages) of laid paper bound in marbled stout paper covers (393 x 246)

Hand

Henry Hake Seward (1778 - 1848)
Pupil and assistant May 1794 - September 1808.

Watermark

various watermarks including: T Stains / 1800, T Willmott / 1804, fleur de lis 1800, 1801 Britannia holding lance, shield and olive branch within crowned oval

Notes

Seward, who had completed his five year articles in May 1799 and was to stay as an asistant until 1808, roughly drew out the measurements of the house and church at Port Eliot from 11th to 18th September 1804. Soane was to have accompanied him but became unwell, making his only site visit in the following month. P.Dean (Sir John Soane and the country estate, 1999, pp.103-4) describes the house as '... long and thin, mostly two rooms deep and parallel with the ancient priory church of St Germans, whose monastic remains are partly incorporated in the structure. Two wings extended at its west end with the distinctive 'round room' recently built at the east end of the house by the architect John Johnson [1732-1814 ]'. Seward's fully drawn out site plans and elevations follow (drawings [47] to [55]).

To avoid tedious repetition, some facts such as page size, water mark and hand are given here and not repeated under individual catalogue entries. Usually a drawing, whether loose or bound into a volume has an individual number. When cataloguing, drawings are numbered (as far as possible) in the sequence that they were made. So that the first drawings for Port Eliot, which are survey drawings made out of the office in a freehand style in September 1804 are numbered [1] to [46]. Then follow the survey drawings based on the earlier drawings made on site beginning with drawing [47].
However, there is a difficulty with catalogue numbers for the first group drawing [1] to [46] which relates to the recto and verso of a sheet. Here the numbering (bottom right-hand corner) follows that principle but when photographed the recto of a sheet was photographed with the verso of the preceding drawing though in fact some of the drawings do span two pages/sheets in that way.


Jill lever
March 2016

Level

group

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).  


Contents of Sketch survey drawings, September 1804 (46)