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  • image SM (9) 16/4/23
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Reference number

SM (9) 16/4/23

Purpose

[9-11] Preliminary design (in Soane's hand), 21 and 22 July 1794

Aspect

9 Plan of ground floor with rough plan of stepped entrance and rough pencil elevation (verso: unfinished pencil Plan of the Ground Floor of a large unidentified country house)

Scale

bar scale of 1/10 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

labelled: Bishops, Archbishops, Anti Room (twice), Lord Chancelor, Anti Room, Kings / Robing, House of Lords, Throne, Door keeper, Mr Rose, Mr Cowper, Gents Usher, Witnesses, Committee Room, Comm[ittee], Door keeper, Black Rod, Corridor, Painted Chamber / decorated with Statues / of Illustrious men / Bassi-Relievi of their Actions &c, Passage, Lord / Great Chan[cellor], Earl / Marshall, Privy / Seal, Court of Requests / to be hung with Paintgs / illustrative of great / actions atchieved (sic) &c, Foot / men, Arcade, door, Hall, Lords, King, Hall, Clos[et], omit these Col[umn]s and B, C with notes: Mr Meyer [one of Soane's pupils] to copy this on a Sheet / of Cartridge paper, leaving the / doubtful parts in Pencil / Jeans [another pupil] to make another outline on a sheet / of paper for another design, observing in both to keep the boundary B as near the edge of the paper C as possible to / show more of Westminster Hall &c

Signed and dated

  • July 21:1794 and July 22 1794

Medium and dimensions

Pen, brown pen, pencil, blue, sepia and burnt umber washes, pricked for transfer on thin wove paper (562 x 693)

Hand

Soane

Notes

The drawing (made, over a survey drawing more detailed than other of these 51 plans save for drawing 1) shows part of Westminster Palace with the Court of Requests, Long Gallery, Painted Chamber, old House of Lords and the Prince's Chamber outlined in sepia wash to indicate that these are to be retained. The new House of Lords lies to the east with adjacent apartments, new or retained on three sides and then continues on the south (right-hand) side and to the west. The western entrance with three openings is roughed-in and then revised in a part-plan. There is no entrance on the south side.

S. Sawyer, 'Soane at Westminster'. PhD thesis, Columbia University, 1999, pp. 157-61 puts this drawing 9 with drawing 4 verso as scheme 'A' in Soane's sequence of designs for the House of Lords.

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).