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- (11) datable to early March 1792 (12) J. S. March 10th 1792
These drawings relate to each other. Drawing 11 precedes drawing 12 as it contains pencil sketches in the centre bay for a lower arch and a fanlight below the lantern, which is included in drawing 12. Drawing 12 delineates the lower wall elevation and fluted pilasters in more detail. Also the height of the arch beneath the upper room has been slightly raised, as has the height of the room itself. The roof above the upper room is slanted, presumably for better draining.
Soane also used drawing 12 to explore several unrealised decorative motifs for the hall's main body (also seen in drawings 6 and 8), including a Vitruvian-scroll architrave and various floral and serpentine spandrel patterns.
Drawing 11 also contains several lightly penciled plan studies in the margins, all showing a domed central space.
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).