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Reference number
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Inscribed
Signed and dated
- May 22nd 1792
Medium and dimensions
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Notes
The drawing catalogued here is dated May 22 1792. However, Soane's office 'Day Book' for 1792 shows that working drawings for Norwich Castle were being made on fourteen days in May 1792, on seven of these days by Meyer and on the others by both Meyer and Chawner. On 19 May a new pupil Thomas Jeans (pupil, 1792-97) was 'shadowing plans', that is, adding coloured washes?. The drawing was presumably made to send out for tender and thus copies were required.
In 1792, there were ten people working in the office. Of these, four were pupils (Chawner, Laing, Meyer and Jeans), two were assistants (Lodder, Ebdon) and four were clerks. Presumably the clerks, among other things, wrote out the specifications and tender documents. Christopher Ebdon (1744-1824) was an architect, experiencing a thin time with his own practice who worked for Soane between 1789-1792.
The drawing relates to construction work within the Norman walls of the Keep. After the removal of internal walls and partitions, Soane built a virtually free-standing structure with a basement, ground floor courtyard and arcade, and three floors over, all underneath the open top of the 90 x 95 feet Keep.
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).