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  • image SM 5/1/27

Reference number

SM 5/1/27

Purpose

[5] Design for ground floor plan

Aspect

The Plan of the Hall floor

Scale

bar scale of 1/3 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

as above, Mr Mansel, height of this floor 12 : 9, labelled Drawing Room, Closet, Vestibule, Justice Room,Closet (twice), Dressing Room, The / Lobby to / the Offices / & Best Staircase, Eating Room, Library Breakfast Room, Scullery, Pantry, Kitchen, The Office Court, and dimensions given. Note: NB A mezzanine over the / Lobby to the Offices, & over / the dressing room, for a / Closet & China / Closet

Signed and dated

  • 10/06/1799
    Lincolns Inn Fields June 10 : 1799

Medium and dimensions

Pen and red wash, pencil, pricked for transfer on wove paper (513 x 610)

Hand

Henry Hake Seward (1778 - 1848)
Pupil and assistant May 1794 - September 1808. Date recorded in Soane office Day Book.

Notes

The change from 54 x 64 feet (drawings ([1-2]) to 60 x 50 feet (all subsequent drawings) makes for a more comfortable layout with rooms two-deep rather than three.
The note to drawing [5] : NB A mezzanine over the / Lobby to Offices, & over / the dressing room, for a / Closet & China / Closet shows Soane's use of a generous floor to ceiling height though here for not much more than an elevated cupboard. 'Mezzanine' is found on a number of Soane's drawings of which the earliest is for Tendring Hall (drawing 11, 1784) ) and there spelt (in the Italian way) 'Mezzanino'. Soane's mezzanines were small and used to provide closets including water closets and so not the low mezzanine floor above the piano nobile of Palladian architecture.

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.

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