[12-13] Design 'No 2' (in Soane's hand) in which the Court of Requests is made into a new House of Lords and copy dated 25 September 1794 (2)

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
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  - London: Palace of Westminster: designs for alterations and additions, 1793-1828 (499)
    - London: House of Lords, Palace of Westminster: official (mostly domeless) designs, July 1794 - February 1795 (134)

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Reference number

SM (12) 36/4/34 (13) 36/4/31

Purpose

[12-13] Design 'N^o 2' (in Soane's hand) in which the Court of Requests is made into a new House of Lords and copy dated 25 September 1794 (2)

Aspect

12 Plan of ground floor 13 Plan of ground floor, neat copy of drawing 12

Scale

(12-13) bar scales of 1/10 of 1 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

(12) N^o2, In this Drawing the Court of Requests is likewise / made into a House of Lords, labelled: The River Thames, Abingdon Street, Old Palace Yard, rooms labelled: The Kings Entrance, The / Kings Robing Room, Doorkeeper (twice), Lord Great / Chamberlain, Passage, The / Prince of Wales, anti / Room, Assistant / Clerk of / Parliament, Anti, Clerk / of / Parliament, Lobby (twice), The House of Lords, Lobby for / Witnesses / attending the / House, Council / attending / the House, The Lords' Entrance, Waiting Room, anti Room, Witnesses, Court, Passage (twice), Black Rod, Serjeant / at / Arms, The Painted Chamber / & / Conferences, Attendants / on the / Lords, The / Duke of Gloucester / & the / Rest of the / Royal Family, Bishops, Archbishops and Earl Marshall (13) labelled as drawing 12

Signed and dated

(13) (pencil) Copy Sep^r 25 94

Medium and dimensions

(12) Pen, sepia, light red, black and burnt umber washes, pricked for transfer with quadruple-ruled and black wash border on laid paper (641 x 535) (13) pen, sepia, light red, black, yellow, blue and green washes, partly pricked for transfer on laid paper (737 x 535)

Hand

(12) Soane, Thomas Jeans (c.1775-1866, pupil August 1792 - 25 August 1797) (13) Frederick Meyer (1775-?, pupil April 1791-1796)

Notes

As Soane notes this design has the Court of Requests as the new House of Lords and, as well, the old House of Lords is again used as a Robing Room and Attendants Room for the Lords. More of the existing buildings are retained, that is, the Prince's Chamber, four adjacent offices east of the old House of Lords and a room labeled 'Lord Chancellor'. The eight-column portico of drawings 10-11 has gone, and on the west side, the twin entrances are replaced by an important looking King's Entrance in the centre that has a porte-cochère fronting a projecting stepped lobby leading to a hall with two ranges of steps. The Robing Room is immediately to the left and the royal route is a short one.

S. Sawyer, 'Soane at Westminster'. PhD thesis, Columbia University, 1999, pp. 165-6 puts drawings 12 and 13 (with drawings 3 and 22) as scheme 'C' in Soane's sequence of designs for the House of Lords. The final design (a 'synthesis of two planning approaches' taken from 'A1' to 'A6') includes drawing 13 (Sawyer, p. 180).

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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.

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).