Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Working drawing, 10 December 1789
  • image SM (1) 81/2/21

Reference number

SM (1) 81/2/21

Purpose

Working drawing, 10 December 1789

Aspect

1 Detail

Scale

full size

Inscribed

Mouldings - full size for chimney peice (sic) / in the Porters room, in the Vestibule leading / to the Rotunda _ / to be executed in Portland Stone, Opening of the Chimney Peice, 3.1" high, 1.0" wide, Wall line (twice), A to project 1/8" before / B.B. as per dotted / line C, A, B, B and C

Signed and dated

  • Welbeck Street 10 Decr. 1[7]89

Hand

Soane office

Notes

Drawing 1 is dated from Welbeck Street, which was Soane's home and office - the lease was purchased 30 November 1786 and the office was moved to Great Scotland Yard, Whitehall in April 1791.

As Soane was making some minor alterations to pre-existing buildings in 1789 it seems likely that drawing 1 shows a chimney-piece designed to be added to one of those older parts of the Bank. The design is very simple (compared to Soane's other chimney-piece designs) and consists of jambs and a frieze section with only incised panels to ornament them.

The design may have been used as a model for many chimney-pieces in different rooms throughout the bank.

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).