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  • image SM drawer 62/1/6

Reference number

SM drawer 62/1/6

Purpose

Preliminary design, showing plan at ground-floor level

Aspect

1 Plan

Scale

10 feet to 7/16 inch approx. (drawn scale)

Inscribed

In pen and brown ink with names of rooms and areas within new plan, and of existing areas, e.g., on left, French Chapel and Duke of Marlborough and Court for the Queen's Chapel and the adjoining courtyard of Marlborough House, and Pallmall below; and in pencil at bottom right in a c18-19 hand, Plan of a Design for a Palace at S.t James's. N.o 1. ; and with pencil notes in a C20 hand below entrance; and on verso in pen and brown ink in an early C18 hand, on left side, horizontally, at edge of second folded compartment from bottom (originally on the outside of the drawing when folded three times), plan for a pallas / at St Jamisas [sic]

Signed and dated

  • c.1715-20

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink over pencil under drawing; on laid paper, folded into eighth-parts, and reinforced on verso with C19 wove paper patch repairs, the glue stains showing through; 476 x 573

Hand

Unidentified Office of Works hand

Watermark

Strasbourg bend / LVG = IV

Notes

In the first proposal for the new palace, the overall width to the Kings Garden (St James's Park) is inscribed as 472 feet. The internal planning is not fully worked out. No doors or hearths are shown and the royal apartments facing the park are undivided spaces. The pen corrections to the dimensions of the courtyard point towards the enlarged plan in 2 and 3. The court is to be increased in width from 131 feet wide by 163 deep to 167 feet square. This is the dimension of the central courtyard in the corresponding ground plan, 2.

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.

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