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Purpose
Notes
Soane describes the ruins in his 1832 publication for which the watercolours were been made (although these particular ones were not included in the final publication). The colonnade is 'composed of mutilated trunks of ancient columns' - part of the same ruins as the colonnade - and the 'ancient colonnade now forms the communication from the present mansion-house into the offices erected on the supposed site of the original structure'. This concept does not appear in earlier designs and Bianca De Divitiis suggests that the extension of the ruin footprint into the colonnade is a reflection of Soane's altered position regarding Pitzhanger.
Literature
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).