Design

Explore Collections

You are here: CollectionsOnline / Design

Browse

Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- 'Original Sketches / Miscellaneous / Architectural / Subjects': album with 195 drawings by Soane, Dance, Holland and others, dated c.1757 to 1818 (volume 42)
  - Volume 42/12: Gillows: Library writing table for Sir James Ibbetson Bart., Denton Park, W.R.Yorkshire

Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image

Print this image in A4 view

Reference number

SM volume 42/12

Purpose

Design

Aspect

Perspectival elevation of a library writing table (or pedestal desk) with drawers in the apron and bow-fronted pedestals with cupboards, and with a brass rail (gallery) supported by four metal colonettes

Inscribed

N^o2, 2 f^t 10, 6 f 6

Medium and dimensions

Pen, sepia wash, pencil, shaded, on laid paper (171 x 210)

Hand

? Gillows

Watermark

(part) post horn within a crowned cartouche

Notes

A plain, generously proportioned and businesslike library writing table or desk. For another, even plainer design for a desk from the same source see following drawing (42/13). The attribution to Gillows for both designs is based on style, the manner of inscription and also an order for two library stools and a step ladder, between 1784 and 1787 (Gillow archive, Westminister City Archive, 344/93/405. p.[xxxvi]). On Gillows see note to 42/11

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).