Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Preliminary design in a Doric style, c. 5-7 May 1780
  • image SM 45/2/7 verso

Reference number

SM 45/2/7 verso

Purpose

Preliminary design in a Doric style, c. 5-7 May 1780

Aspect

1 Back elevation

Scale

to a scale

Medium and dimensions

Pencil and sepia wash, shaded on laid paper (519 x 375)

Hand

Soane

Notes

Swiftly drawn on the back of a measured drawing probably made 5-7 May 1780 (see Soane in Italy: measured drawings: Verona: Porta di San Zeno) and with pencil guidelines to the proportions of the front and of the entablature, the design shows a five-bay elevation with a bow articulated by four Doric columns. Above the parapet rises a drum (three bays in width and supporting a shallow, conical roof) decorated with drops and festoons. This elevation relates to the circular dining room in the plan shown on drawing 2. And to the rough plan and elevations drawn by Soane in his Downhill note/sketchbook (SM volume 80 f.4 recto: see Sketchbooks catalogue) for a small house with a domed drawing room.

Literature

P. du Prey, John Soane: the making of an architect, 1982, p.384, fn.19

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).