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  • image SM 2/8/1

Reference number

SM 2/8/1

Purpose

[9] Slightly variant design for front elevation

Aspect

Elevation of the Entrance Front and plan of front wall

Scale

bar scale of ¼ inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

as above, Robert Dennistoun Esqre, dimensions given

Signed and dated

  • 17/12/1798
    17th Decr 1798

Medium and dimensions

Pen, sepia, blue and red washes on wove paper (485 x 610)

Hand

Attributed to Henry Hake Seward (1778 - 1848)
Pupil and assistant May 1794 - September 1808. No entry in the Soane office Day Book.

Notes

New are the pedimented side doors placed '7:6' away from the house. The conditions on the sale of the site (quoted by G.Stamp, op.cit., p.184) included 'a neat gateway for filling up the vacant space left for such entry betwixt their respective houses to be built'. This is explained by Stamp as 'a Glasgow tradition of having arched entrances to the spaces left between merchants' town houses'. But Soane was only required to provide a side entrance on the left-hand side of the house. This design and that of drawing [11] (and [21]) show an entrance on both sides. Symmetry was important to Soane and he would have disliked the idea of a mis-matched design on one side of his house.

The design differs from that of drawing [8] in that the roof is now shown. Revised are details such as a pediment added to the front door, a balustrade placed above the cornice and the three tablets above the ground floor windows reduced to two and differently proportioned.

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.

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