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- Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- (40) datable to March 1792 (on comparison with drawing 41) (41) Copy 29th March 1792
Light pencil sketches of alternative arch shapes on drawing 40 demonstrates Soane's persistent experimentation with segmental versus semi-circular arching, probably both for reasons of structure and aesthetics.
Drawing 41 shows, on the left, the elevation and partial structure of one of the hall's four end-bay arches and, on the right, the structure of one of the four side-aisle arches. The general form of the arches is shown as executed. However, the final facing of the end-bay arch is not drawn, indicating that this sheet may have been completed before the ornamentation was set. These arches are also shown in drawings 18 and 22. The date of the drawing, 29 March 1792, suggests that the structure of the hall was set by this time.
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).