[79] Site record drawing, 28 September 1810

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Public buildings
  - London: Royal Hospital, Chelsea for the Board of Commissioners, 1807-1835 (226)
    - Infirmary, August 1809 - November 1810, April - July 1818 and c.1833 (88)

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Reference number

SM 67/2/18

Purpose

[79] Site record drawing, 28 September 1810

Aspect

Perspective showing the south-west facade of Yarborough House and the new Infirmary

Signed and dated

Sept^r. 28^th. 1810

Hand

Soane office

Notes

This drawing, SM 67/2/19 and SM 67/2/20 are site sketches intended as preliminaries to worked-up perspectives (which are themselves evident in the following group of drawings). All three are on the same type of paper and are the same size. The drawing shows parts of the south front, with scaffolding and timber lying around. The scaffolding appears to have been braced by an attachment to the pre-existing Wren building.

Walter Godfrey writes that these (and the following group's) progress drawings provide some of the only visual evidence for the appearance of Yarborough House and that 'It is evident from the drawings that in order to make way for the new building it was at first dismantled, with the exception of the extreme southern wing, which was left untouched until the work was approaching completion. This is the wing that Soane incorporated in his Infirmary and which tradition has called Sir Robert Walpole's Drawing room (as seen here and in SM 67/2/20).

Literature

W. Godfrey (ed.), Survey of London: volume 2: Chelsea, part 1, 1909, pp. 3-8

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).