Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Preliminary designs and unfinished design for the auditorium, c1789, unexecuted (3)

Purpose

Preliminary designs and unfinished design for the auditorium, c1789, unexecuted (3)

Notes

Sheppard suggests the possibility that SM Adam volume 27/49 may belong to an earlier scheme, citing references to alterations made to the interiors of the Vanbrugh theatre in 1788. However, the composition of SM Adam volume 27/49, showing a stage with barrel-vaulted ceiling and Corinthian colonnaded wings, along with the coved ceiling for the auditorium suggest the design is indeed part of this scheme, with similar features shown in SM Adam volumes 28/20, 47/3-47/4 and 47/6. Sheppard also suggests that amongst preliminary designs made for the King’s box, (SM Adam volumes 27/77-27/84), which Bolton catalogued as for the Italian/Little theatre, Haymarket, there may be designs for an earlier scheme for the opera house. SM Adam volume 27/82 is inscribed as Kings Box in the Italian Theatre, and SM Adam volume 27/79 appears to be of a similar design. However, the other preliminary designs are not inscribed and there is variation enough to allow consideration for attributing to other theatres. Indeed SM Adam volume 27/80 bears resemblance to the Haymarket scheme, but this would suggest a date c1789, rather than as part of an earlier scheme.

Level

Group

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 Preliminary designs and unfinished design for the auditorium, c1789, unexecuted (3)