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Alternative preliminary designs and a record drawing for the pyramid gate, 1776, Adam volume 51/73 as executed (3)

Notes

The pyramid gate, sometimes called the obelisk lodge, Featherstone lodge, sphinx gate or needle’s eye is located on the northern boundary of the park. This was once the most important entrance to the park, leading north to Pontefract and York.

Adam volume 51/73 shows the design as it was executed. The design mimics the Tomb of Cestius in Rome, and includes a 43-foot high pyramid.

There are 14 extant Adam office drawings for various gateways within the private drawings collection of Lord St Oswald and the National Trust drawings collection at Nostell Priory. At least one of these is a finished drawing for the pyramid gate as executed.

The park, including the pyramid gate, was purchased by the National Trust in 2003. They immediately set about restoring this building as it had fallen into a ruinous state. The sculpted sphinxes were lost at an unknown date.

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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 Alternative preliminary designs and a record drawing for the pyramid gate, 1776, Adam volume 51/73 as executed (3)