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  • image SM volume 59/65

Reference number

SM volume 59/65

Purpose

[53] Sketch from south east

Aspect

Perspective of South Front

Inscribed

as above, Ramsey Abbey

Signed and dated

  • 08/06/1806
    June 8 1806 / HSS

Medium and dimensions

Pen and sepia wash, shaded, on laid paper (195 x 332)

Hand

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

Notes

These informal sketches are signed 'HHS' by Henry Hake Seward. Since office drawings were never signed the drawings must have been made for himself though later added to one of Soane's (record) volumes.

The sketch is dated 8 June 1806 and the very first drawings for Ramsey are dated 12 May 1804. In Soanes' Office Journal there is an entryfor 6 June 1806 - 'Seward & Adams set / out for Ramsey to meas: [ure]/ the Works, ret.[urned]June 15'. The measuring up would have been to calculate the amount of work done in order to pay the various tradesmen and also to estimate the work still required to be done. Perhaps Seward's sketches gloss over the unfinished work and the untidy character of a building site.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Soane Revisited, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, March - August 1996

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).