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Purpose

London: King's Theatre (Opera House): designs for an opera house, c.1790 (9)

Notes

The King's Theatre at Haymarket was destroyed by fire in June 1789. Soane made designs for a competing opera house in Leicester Square but after this scheme was dropped he assisted in surveying the Haymarket theatre as it was rebuilt in 1790. Both the design and the surveys were commissioned by Robert Bray O'Reilly. Work came to a halt in January 1791. See scheme notes for: London: design for an opera house to be built on the site of Leicester House garden, 1790

Madeleine Helmer, April 2012

Level

Scheme

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.

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Contents of London: King's Theatre (Opera House): designs for an opera house, c.1790 (9)