[15] Alternative elevations with some details added by Soane

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Town houses
  - Reading, Berkshire: Friar Street, house for Lancelot Austwick, 1796 (32)
    - Designs made April 1796 (4)

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Reference number

SM 2/7A/1

Purpose

[15] Alternative elevations with some details added by Soane

Aspect

Elevation of two-storey house and of three-storey house with rough detals of cornice (toothing), door and doorway added by Soane

Scale

bar scale of 1/5 of 1 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

as above, L.Austwick Esq^re, Make this / door like / the door / of my house, c.c.c. equal spaces, Cornice llike / this, Floor, (pencil, against chimney stack) X ---- paint / barely visible and some dimensions given

Signed and dated

13/04/1796
Ap:13 1796

Medium and dimensions

Pen, sepia, yellow and blue washes, brown pen additions, pencil, with single ruled border on thin laid paper (521 x 314)

Hand

Some inscriptions by Soane to a drawing made by Henry Hake Seward (1778 - 1848), pupil and assistant May 1794 - September 1808. Information from the office Day Book, entry for 13 April 1796.

Notes

The changes to the initial elevation made by Soane include the doors to be the same as those of his own house - number 12 Lincolns Inn Fields built by Soane, 1792-94. The cornice (toothing) drawn here is also found on his own house(s). The doors are shown here as having three pairs of panels that become longer as they progress downwards. Soane's design is more subtle so there are at the top: short panels followed by longest panels and finished at the bottom with medium-sized panels, for which see drawing [16].

The overall design is very different to the plain, unfussy elevation of drawing [9] though the instruction to use the full width of the site is maintained here. There is a choice between a two-storey or three-storey building that, with three front doors (one is false) is clearly a business premises as well as a home. The amphorae standing in two niches allude to Mr Austwick's interest in the wine trade.

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).