Browse
Purpose
Notes
Drawing 138 has columns lining the walls of the entrance hall, the ceiling of the hall divided into three cross-vaulted bays. The dimensions of the hall do not vary from Soane's previous design, drawing 136 and 137, but the ornament is altered to show a Doric style. As in drawing 136, the entrance hall consists of a rectangular-plan room behind the porte-cochère and between small canted wings. As in drawing 136, the ground floor of the existing house is shown in part, with alterations shown that include a geometrical principal staircase and an adjacent vestibule partitioned with paired columns. Soane's inscription on drawing 138 'Qy light' concerns a light source in this vestibule, as there are no external walls in the room that could provide space for a window.
Level
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).