Record copies of alternative designs (2)

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Country houses, etc.
  - Letton Hall, Norfolk: (executed) house for Dillingham Brampton Gurdon Dillingham, 1783-1789 (74)

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Reference number

SM volume 66/73, volume 66/74

Purpose

Record copies of alternative designs (2)

Aspect

18 Copy of ground floor plan and three elevations of a two-storey house, three by five bays with a service wing on the right hand side shown on the plan only, with tall, square-headed ground floor windows set in blind arches on three fronts 19 Copy of ground floor plan and three elevations of a two-storey house with attic and basement, three-bay back and front elevations, with a Diocletian window above the back bow and Wyatt windows to ground floor back and front

Scale

(18-19) bar scale of 1/12 in to 1 ft

Inscribed

(18) rooms labelled (small capitals) : Eating Parlor, Library, Drawing Room, Best Staircase, Vestibule / 17.0 square, Housekeeper, Closet, Butler, Kitchen, Scullery and (right hand offices) Area (3 times), Servants Hall, Cleaning Boots, Passage to Court, Pantry, Washouse / and / Laundry and dimensions given (19) rooms labelled (small capitals): Eating Parlor, Music Room / and / Library, Drawing Room, Best Staircase, Vestibule / 18.0 by 16.0, Gentleman's Dressing Room, Powdering Closet, Dressing Room, State Bedchamber and dimensions given

Signed and dated

badly-nested tags: br

Medium and dimensions

(18-19) Pen, sepia blue washes, shaded, some watercolour technique, some pricking for transfer on laid paper bound into volume 66 (702 x 497)

Hand

(18-19) David Laing (pupil 1790-6 - for another drawing by the same hand see drawing 16). See also H.Colvin, Biographical dictionary of British architects 1600-1840, 3rd ed., 1995 for Laing's unfortunate history.

Watermark

(18) I Taylor, fleur-de-lis within crowned cartouche with GR below (17) Edmeades & Pine, and fleur-de-lis within crowned cartouche with GR below

Notes

The drawings are not inscribed with place or client but the Concise Catalogue has them as for Letton Hall and this seems right. The designs each have a semicircular, four-column portico and a bowed drawing room on the opposite side and the elevations are decorated with tablets carved with festoons and with urns that also have festoons. Elevationally uninspired, the main exercise must have been to explore the placing of the offices and the advantages of a two-storey with service wing versus a two-storey with attic and basement.

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).