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  • image SM 109/21

Reference number

SM 109/21

Purpose

[12/17] Survey drawing of the ground floor of King William's Court, showing the accommodation layout

Aspect

Plan of main floor (i.e. raised ground floor level)

Scale

20 feet to 1 inch

Inscribed

In ink in unidentified hand, Principal Floor of King Will:ms Court / Private men 134; and in C19 hand at top and bottom right, 21.; and with numbered scale at bottom of sheet

Signed and dated

  • Undated, but datable c.1735

Medium and dimensions

Pen and grey ink over graphite under-drawing, with grey wash; on laid paper, laid down, extended by 20 mm with backing strip at bottom edge; 500 X 364

Hand

Unidentified hand in office of Thomas Ripley

Watermark

IV

Notes

See notes for [12/15]. Only 62 cubicles are drawn in the rooms on the south side. The other 112 men would presumably have been accommodated in the rooms in the central range and in the spaces not shown with cubicles in the south range.

The plan provides external staircases at the north and south ends of the colonnades. These are proposed additions to the existing fabric, since by then the side staircase on the north side of the Great Hall, shown on the model of 1699, had already been built. The staircase arrangement on the north side of this plan appears on [12/1] (c.1728) and [12/8] (c.1735). A pre-construction plan of the main floor of Queen Mary's Court at the National Maritime Museum (Wren Society, VI, pl. 30, bottom) has a matching scheme for staircase platforms at both ends.

Literature

Not in Wren Society

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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.

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