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Signed and dated
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Notes
The decorative scheme was influenced by that of the Arch of Constantine, Rome (just as the entrance facade suggests the proportions of that arch). Specifically, the Thomas Banks roundels of Sol and Lunar are based on those of the Arch of Constantine (also used on the south entrance arch to the Lothbury Courtyard at the Bank of England) and are still in place today.
The double height part of the vestibule is enclosed by a flattened dome, and in its centre is a plaster rosette supplied by Benjamin Grant in 1801. Some of the designs for the vestibule including drawings 126 (section 4) and 186 show an object with a repeated S-shaped pattern that is probably an iron railing, surrounding a circular opening in the ceiling. This would have been designed to let light into the vestibule from the lantern above. For whatever reason this was never constructed, as the bill for the plaster flower and its presence today suggest. Instead light was drawn from the (then) amber coloured glass in the upper walls of the vestibule, as can be seen in C. J. Richardson’s watercolour in the 1830s (drawing 260).
Virginia Brilliant's TS Pitzhanger catalogue has been instrumental to the creation of this catalogue.
Matilda Burn 2010
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).