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Presentation drawings and record copy of variant designs for the entrance screen, one dated February 1808 (4)

Notes

Drawings 48 and 49 are presentation drawings of the entrance screen. Drawings 50 and 51 are record drawings, showing almost the same design but with a variant parapet design and including a single strigillated urn over the entrance gate. The limestone building is a paired down design, consisting of an arch between the two lodges. The front elevation of each lodge, as in drawing 50, has a recessed window framed by Greek Doric columns. The rear elevation does not have columns. Arthur Bolton, former curator of the Soane Museum (1864-1945, curator 1917-45), writes about the screen: 'This is a most interesting design, whether seen in front, where the Doric Order is employed, or from back, where Soane successfully dispensed with a columnar treatment' (A. Bolton, p. 19). Nikolaus Pevsner called the entrance screen 'a monument of European importance... it is entirely independent of period precedent, a sign of daring only matched at that moment by what Ledoux was designing in France and Gilly in Germany' (Pevsner and Williamson, p. 703). The building still stands, forming the entrance to Tyringham House, though the chimney pots have since been removed.

Literature

A. Bolton, The Works of Sir John Soane, 1924, p. 19; N. Pevsner & E. Williamson, Buckinghamshire, 1994, p.703.

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Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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.

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Contents of Presentation drawings and record copy of variant designs for the entrance screen, one dated February 1808 (4)