Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Preliminary design for the plan of the house, 17 bays wide
  • image SM volume 111/31

Reference number

SM volume 111/31

Purpose

Preliminary design for the plan of the house, 17 bays wide

Aspect

1 Plan at ground-floor level.

Scale

No scale bar, but 40 feet to 1 3/10 inches from dimension on plan.

Inscribed

In pencil, by William Talman, on plans of three rooms in centre of top of plan, 40, 55, 40; and on verso, in pencil, by John Talman, Duke of Newcastle, and on left-hand side, in C18-19 pen and brown ink, 3W47.

Signed and dated

  • c.1702-03

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink with grey wash, over pencil under-drawing, with amendments in pencil; thin laid paper, 117 x 222.

Hand

William Talman

Watermark

none

Notes

This plan is an initial proposal for the ground floor of the Duke of Newcastle's house, and is preparatory to the 'grand scheme' at 2 and 3 below (111/28, 22). There are no steps front and back on this plan, and the lower central flight of the imperial staircase has twice the number of steps as on the finished plan, suggesting that in this plan is at ground level. If so, it probably followed the arrangement of the sixteenth-century courtyard house on the site, whose plan is known from a survey drawing of 1618 by John Smythson at the RIBA (Smythson, III/4; see Girouard, Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan Country House, 1983, pl. 191). Talman has incorporated pairs of square closets separated by narrow chambers (probably garderobes) at each of the angles of the plan. The front wings have small service stairs on their inner sides.

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).