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You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  [51-52] Presentation design ? No.1 for laying before the Committee for Building, January 1818 (2)
  • image Image 1 for SM (51) 48/1/39 (52) 48/1/36
  • image Image 2 for SM (51) 48/1/39 (52) 48/1/36
  • image Image 1 for SM (51) 48/1/39 (52) 48/1/36
  • image Image 2 for SM (51) 48/1/39 (52) 48/1/36

Reference number

SM (51) 48/1/39 (52) 48/1/36

Purpose

[51-52] Presentation design ? No.1 for laying before the Committee for Building, January 1818 (2)

Aspect

51 Plan of the ground floor with some rough additions 52 Plan of the ground floor

Scale

(51-52) scale bars of 3½ inches to 10 feet

Inscribed

51 (pencil, Soane) Skylig[ht], MrH[igham's] Dress[in]g (room) and pencil calculation

Medium and dimensions

(51) Pen, sepia, grey-blue and pink washes, pencil with double ruled and black wash border on wove paper (811 x 607) (52) pen, sepia and grey washes with double ruled and black wash border on wove paper (812 x 612)

Hand

(51-52) George Bailey (1792-1860, pupil then assistant, 1806-37, curator 1837-60)

Watermark

(51-52) J Whatman 1816

Notes

On 29 January 1818 Soane lay before the Bank of England's Committee for Building three variant designs for the National Debt Redemption Office. The design catalogued above is followed by two others marked 'No 2' and 'No3' (drawings 53-4, 55-58). It is not certain that drawings 51 and 52 represent design 'No1' though it seems likely. The plans have a 3½ foot revision to the back boundary line (followed in all subsequent plans) that enlarges the site and regularizes it. The premises of Messrs Mello, Pead and Co. are still shown as such. However Soane was given permission by the Committee to negotiate for its sale to the Bank.
The designs focus on the Cenotaph to Pitt the Younger which is placed in the centre and on an axis with the entrance. Soane has made amendments to the disposition of columns of the tribune that vary in drawing 51 and are resolved in drawing 52.

Level

Drawing

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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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