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Reference number
Purpose
Aspect
Inscribed
Signed and dated
- (62-63) datable to 11 December 1791
Medium and dimensions
Hand
Watermark
Notes
The column-flue on drawing 62 is decorated in two parts: an ornate lower stage and a spiraling upper stage. The capital sprouts into a radial vault supporting the lantern roof. The dome's pendentives are fluted, with scalloped archivolts, and there are square panels, sketched in at the base of the soffit (as eventually realised).
On the verso of drawing 62 are four studies exploring alternatives for planning and vaulting the hall, similar to drawings 60-61. At the top, a five-bay hall features clerestory lunettes (similar to those eventually realised). The centre plan shows a hall divided into two bays with twin crossing-vaultings or domes (similar to Soane's preliminary twin-dome scheme of drawing 4). The bottom plan includes marked dimensions and shows a rectangular central area (demarcated perhaps by counters) and a lightly penciled dome at one end. A final plan, on the drawing's bottom right, shows a cross-vaulted central area. As with drawings 59-61, the existing foundations are not taken into account in any of the studies.
Drawing 63 similarly shows a column-flue articulated in two stages, except that here the lower stage features simpler spiraling and the upper stage is more elaborate with a vegetal capital and radial vault similar to Dance's margin study in drawing 1. Smoke rises whimsically from the chimney. Elsewhere on the drawing are a rough plan of the hall with the stove surrounded by counters, an elevation of the side aisles with segmental arches, and an upward perspective into a radial vault.
Level
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).