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- Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
Purpose
Notes
The elevation is for the west front as it was built in 1788, before an extension was built to the north (see the right-hand side of drawing 20). The west front is a five-bay elevation on three storeys, with a pedimented entrance porch between windows set in round-headed panels. A small parapet crowns the centre three bays. The sheet also includes a rough wall-plan, showing both end bays fronted by columns and a portico of paired columns in the centre.
The recto of the sheet is a design for a chimney-piece of a drawing room at Norwood House, dated 31 August 1802. The owner of the house, John Robins, was an auctioneer and Soane's friend and neighbour; they collaborated on the valuation and supply of furnishings on many properties in the West End of London (P. Dean, p.171, reference to Priv. Corr. VII.D).
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).