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  • image SM 48/4/4
Drawing. SM 48/4/4. ©Sir John Soane's Museum, London. Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama
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Reference number

SM 48/4/4

Purpose

Competition design for a large building (a palazzo?) with a theatre

Aspect

[1] Preliminary design

Scale

to a scale

Signed and dated

  • 1760

Medium and dimensions

Pen, sepia, light blue and raw umber washes, pencil, within single ruled border on laid paper, recently backed with tissue paper, folded three times (850 x 835)

Hand

Dance

Watermark

encircled fleur-de-lis

Notes

The drawing is incomplete so that, for example, the right-hand H-wing does not have the room divisions drawn in.

The plan shows a vast complex symmetrically planned within a park. At one end of this park is a bridged canal with terraces stairs and fountains and both the hard landscape and the avenue of trees echo the building plan and continue the lines of axis. Overall, the plan consists of two H-shaped wings (with elongated and hollow cross-bars) facing each other across a huge courtyard, connected at one end by the main body of the building which contains a theatre. The apsidal end of the theatre (the horseshoe-shaped auditorium with gallery) projects into the courtyard while a deep stage area as well as the entrance and foyers are in its rectangular body, enclosed on three sides by a smaller courtyard. Every external wall has a stepped base, and colonnades front most of the building.

Level

Drawing

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).