Browse
Reference number
Purpose
Aspect
Scale
Inscribed
Signed and dated
- c.1757-8
Medium and dimensions
Hand
Watermark
Notes
The 'china room', which is almost as large as the common parlour, was a social and entertainment space that housed 'a dense display of especially cherished pieces' (A. Somers Clocks, 'The Nonfunctional use of ceramics in the English Country House during the eighteenth century' in G.Jackson-Stops et al. The Fashioning and functioning of the British country house, catalogue of an exhibition of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1989, p.214) and had its heyday in the third quarter of the 18th century. Allowing for this, there is still an awkwardness about the planning, for example, in the placing of the utilitarian rooms - the kitchen is on the garden front next to the best parlour - and the circulation is poor.
Level
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).