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  • image SM volume 42/153 recto and verso

Reference number

SM volume 42/153 recto and verso

Purpose

Preliminary design

Aspect

Part Plan, part elevations, Section on BC and details

See Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire: drawing 22, for full catalogue of SM volume 42/153

Scale

to various scales including Half size

Inscribed

as above, Arch (twice), Niche, arched as / plan dotted / lines, Stone (three times), Wood, Three courses of brickwork, labelled A, B C (twice), D (twice), E and dimensions given. Noted Tuesday 5 o'Clock / Mr Mitford / Mrs Yorkes Stables, calculations and (verso, pencil) plan and calculations

Signed and dated

  • datable to 1794

Medium and dimensions

Brown pen, pencil on laid paper with one fold mark and folded to fit (394 x 323)

Hand

Soane

Watermark

Britannia with spear, shield and olive branch within a crowned oval, and crowned GR

Notes

Soane's screen with its arched entrance and flanking lodges was completed in 1796 but by 1804 cracks had developed in the central arch and it was eventually demolished and replaced by another screen designed by H.E.Kendall. See D.Adshead, op. cit, for an account.
For further drawings at the Soane Museum see SM volume 68/13-17 (variant designs dated 24 January 1794) and SM 62/8/45-6 (copies of surveys dated 28 April 1818). The drawing catalogued above was probably made in 1794 after 24 January. It is close to the survey drawings of 1818 but without, for example, the columns in antis.
'Mr Mitford' was William Mitford of Pitshill near Tillington, Sussex for whom, in March 1794, Soane provided several designs for alterations. A misunderstanding involving the builder led Soane to claim that he had destroyed the drawings. In fact, there are in the Soane Museum, floor plans dated 5 March 1794 (SM 46/3/8-9) and designs for the principal front (SM volume 68/1-4).
For the Hon. Mrs Yorke, Soane did several jobs including Sydney Lodge, Hamble, Hampshire, 1789-1798.

Literature

P.du Prey, Sir John Soane, 1985, in series of 'Catalogues of architectural drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum', 1975, cat.140-1; D.Stroud, Sir John Soane, 2nd ed., 1996, p.257; pp.140-1; 147-9; D.Adshead, Wimpole, architectural drawings ..., 2007, pp.97-99

Level

Drawing

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

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).