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  • image SM 37/2/15

Reference number

SM 37/2/15

Purpose

[1] Survey of outbuildings, 1817

Aspect

Plan of part of the Offices at the Queen's Palace (Buckingham House)

Scale

bar scale of 1/8 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

as above, labelled: Closet (4 times), Step, Pump / to Water / Closet, to hold / Sedan / Chair, Coal Box, Cinders, Store for Coals, Dust hole, Lamp Lighter's / Shed, Bricklayer's / Shed, Engine house, Store Room, Carpenter's / Shop, Book Binder's / Stamp Shop, Smith's / Shop, Glazier's Shop, Carpenter's Shop

Signed and dated

  • 1817
    1817

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pricked for transfer on wove paper (408 x 535)

Hand

Soane Office

Watermark

J Whatman / 1804

Notes

The outbuildings are to the east of the original house, according to a plan in King's Works, V, p. 135. The large, octagonal building shown in this survey is the library, later converted into a chapel (now the site of the Queen's Gallery). The outbuildings include store sheds and workshops for various servants: the lamp lighter, the bricklayer, the carpenter, the book binder, the smith and the glazier. This survey was made after Soane's report in November 1816 in which he recommended rebuilding some of the outbuildings 'in a more corrected plan' (King's Works, VI, p. 262). In his ninth lecture to the Royal Academy, Soane had spoken of the 'domestic offices' at Buckingham House, which were 'arranged in the front of the main building, and connected therewith... but I cannot think it advisable to contract a large front... but would rather leave the opening clear and spacious' (quoted in Watkin, Enlightenment Thought, p. 620).

Level

Drawing

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.

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).