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  • image SM Adam volume 47/5
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Reference number

SM Adam volume 47/5

Purpose

[22] Finished drawing for the auditorium, with a view towards the boxes, c1789, unexecuted

Aspect

Axial section of the opera house, from west to east. The west wing has a pitched roof, and at the ground-storey level there is a central corridor, flanked by rooms containing fireplaces. At the first-storey level there is a room with a central entrance, set behind a Tuscan screen with a frieze of fluting, and this is flanked by further entrances. At the second-storey level there is a central room, with a balustraded apse, and a domed ceiling ornamented with swags, and the flanking rooms contain figurative panels set within niches. The auditorium is as SM Adam volume 28/22, but one tier of boxes is omitted, and the ceiling coving is ornamented with flora set within semi-circular compartments. The east wing contains rooms at the ground, first and second storeys, and this is surmounted by a drum ornamented with rosettes and festoons, and supporting a stepped, ribbed dome with a spire. The east front has a rusticated arcade at the ground-storey level, and this supports a balustraded Corinthian portico, surmounted by statuary

Scale

bar scale of 1 inch to 5 feet

Inscribed

Section across the Opera House shewing the pit the front boxes & galleries over[_ _] (in pencil) / No 5 (in pencil)

Signed and dated

  • c1789
    c1789

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, wash and coloured washes including pink, verdigris, Naples yellow and Indian yellow within a single ruled border on laid paper (935 x 596)

Hand

Possibly
Office hand, possibly Robert Morison or Daniel Robertson

Watermark

PVL

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 40
Sheppard, 1960, Volume XXIX, (i), p. 249
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

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).