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- 1805-12
There is, in the library of the Royal College of Surgeons, an elevation of the Lincoln's Inn Fields front with a six-column Ionic portico, signed and dated as above and inscribed 'Copy'. It shows a seven-bay, three storey front with semicircular-headed windows to the ground and second floors, two entrance doors with circular fanlights and an Ionic portico having a frieze inscribed QUÆ PROSVNT OMNIBUS ARTES and a balustrade above the entablature with six shallow urns over the capitals (RCS Library, catalogue 299). However, some details are not as executed, for example, the two elongated elliptical skylights of the museum. The anatomy theatre has 11 rows of benches arranged in a semicircle.
REPRODUCED. Stroud fig. 57b, captioned 'Dance's final plan for reconstruction to form a new museum and lecture hall'.
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).