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  • image SM (1) 32/2a/11v

Reference number

SM (1) 32/2a/11v

Purpose

Survey drawing of the Armoury, December 1788

Aspect

1 Part of a plan of the Soldiers Room, rough transverse elevation of a room with segemental arched lunette; (verso) plan of the ground floor of 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields showing the staircase in a transverse position with rough designs by Soane

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

as above and in reference to verso: Mr Soane / Plan of parlor floor of / intended House in / Lincolns Inn Fields / August 17th 1792

Signed and dated

  • Welbeck Street. Decr 4th 88

Hand

Soane office

Watermark

cartouche with fleur-de-lis and W below

Notes

The drawings shows the Armoury on the west side of the Garden Court. The room is lit by three Venetian windows as it was originally designed by Robert Taylor. Soane added three clerestory windows in later designs. D. Abramson writes that the original function of this room is unidentified, although there is evidence that it was later used by Soane as an Armoury. The early date of this drawing, and its apparent purpose as a survey drawing, suggests that the room was already an Armoury at Soane's appointment.

Soane lived at 77 Welbeck Street from 1786 until he moved to 12 Lincoln's Inn Fields, purchased in 1792.

Literature

D. Abramson Money's Architecture: The Building of the Bank of England, 1731-1833, Pt.1, Doctoral thesis for the Department of Fine Arts, Harvard University, 1993. p. 310.

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).