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Rough elevation of portico with four Egyptian columns supporting a frieze-cornice with winged sun-discs with door-window-door indicated, and rough sketch plan of a double range of columns with steps at one end and an apse at the other and related part-section with statue of Bacchus? with an elephant's head? above
Pencil
The elevation of an Egyptian front is close to another rough elevation on the back of a drawing for a chimney-piece with a pylon-like form for Stratton Park ([SM D1/4/9]). This is one of four drawings for an Egyptian chimney-piece for Stratton, one of which ([SM D1/4/8]) is dated 12 December 1804.
This instance of a design in an Egyptian style for a chimney-piece leading to a design for the front of a theatre, both sharing a pylon-like form, illustrates rather well how an architect's mind may work.
Signed and dated
- 1804-5
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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).