Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Alternative unexecuted designs for further alterations and additions, 1797, 1799 (4)

Browse

Purpose

Alternative unexecuted designs for further alterations and additions, 1797, 1799 (4)

Notes

While drawing 18 was made by Soane, drawing 19 (neatly made on good quality paper with a border and landscape embellishment) is perhaps a presentation drawing intended for the client made by Henry Seward, a pupil just about to complete his articles. For a copy of drawing 19 without the trees and kitchen table see drawing 21. Drawing 19 is probably an unfinished copy of a 'plan of the principal floor on one sheet of Elephant paper' sent to Austin Friars for Mr Godfrey Thornton (Soane office Journal). Thornton lived at 28 Austin Friars in the City of London.
The first two designs, made two years apart, keep the three rooms, hall and stair as re-modelled by Soane in 1791-2 and with the lesser changes shown on drawing 15 and here propose a new eating room. The drawing of 1797 (18) has an alternative plan for the eating room with an apsidal end and Mr Thornton's room has also an apsidal end. Both are omitted in the 1799 drawing (19). While the drawings differ on the north side in their proposals for Mr Thornton's room, both give it direct access to the garden. Other proposals are for a rebuilding of the offices (save for the existing laundry and servants hall) around an internal court with covered ways.
Drawing 20 has the same arrangment of the offices seen in drawings 18 and 19, different is the proposal to enlarge the eating room by simply taking in the anteroom to make a rectangular room and to re-organise the stairs so that the best stair is now a flying stair. Drawing 21 is one of several drawings for Moggerhanger copied to a reduced scale by a pupil as part of his education in 1807 or later.
On his death Godfrey Thornton (1737-1805) left Moggerhanger to his son Stephen Thornton. Thus drawings dated from 1806 were commissioned by Stephen Thornton (see on).

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 Alternative unexecuted designs for further alterations and additions, 1797, 1799 (4)