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Purpose
Signed and dated
- 1790
Notes
Soane made a preliminary design on 5 April 1790. Three days later, John Sanders (pupil 1784-October 1790) delivered a copy of this design to the client. The client must not have been satisfied, however, as two more designs were delivered by Soane a few weeks later, on April 25th (Ledger C). A drawing at the Victoria and Albert Museum is dated 24 April 1790; it is probably one of the two designs presented by Soane to the client. The V&A drawing is for a more elaborate scheme, with circular rooms flanking the entrance hall and stairwell (see catalogue by P. du Prey).
Drawings corresponding to Soane's earlier design were published in his Sketches in Architecture, 1793. The publication also includes upper floor plans of the proposed house, showing a drawing room, ante-room and one bedroom on the first floor and four bedrooms in the attic.
Literature: P.du Prey, Sir John Soane, 1985, in series of 'Catalogues of architectural drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum', catalogue 65-66, pp. 43-44; P. Dean, Sir John Soane and the country estate, 1999, p.181.
Madeleine Helmer, 2012
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).