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  • image SM volume 57/30

Reference number

SM volume 57/30

Purpose

[1] Plan and south wall elevation/section, April/May 1787

Aspect

Section No 1 : plan and south wall elevation/section of a long, narrow barrel-vaulted gallery on an east-west axis, top-lit by three skylights on domes (the centre one elliptical). The wall is articulated by four doors plus two areas of wall that are both to receive sunk panels (for coloured prints of Raphael's arabesques from the Vatican loggie), together with two pairs of Ionic columns and a chimneypiece with glass (mirror). The bar scale indicates a length of approximately 59 feet and a width of eight feet, and the plan is marked for five doors (one is opposite the chimneypiece) so that the remaining four (of nine) are false.

Scale

feint (pricked and pencil) bar scale of 1/8 inch to one foot

Inscribed

as above, Center is left plain to contrast / with the richness of each end / & side, At the [west] End next [to] Alcove on a Pedestal an Apollo [statue], I.I.I.(inscribed on panels), I.I.I. The drawings in / Sunk Pannells, Over the Column, Antique Lion / Vases of Etruria &c, Apollo, door (three times), door / to Great Stair, door with Library, door / to blue Stair and (pencil) calculations relating to measurements so that, for example there is a total of 58 3 3/5 and another of 58.1 (length of the gallery ?)

Signed and dated

  • April 1787 - May 1787
    datable to April/May 1787 (see Notes in group folder)

Medium and dimensions

Brown pen on laid paper (187 x 295) Drawings 1-6 are on the same type of thin laid paper, each with three or four fold marks. All of the drawings are pasted into an album with (blue) sugar paper leaves (volume 57)

Hand

SOANE, Sir John (1754--1837), architect
Soane

Watermark

not available (affixed at corners and edges)

Literature

For further reading see J. Lever, 'The Soane-Dance collaboration, 1771-1799', Architectural History: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, volume 53, pp.163-190

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).