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- 1805-12
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The drawings all show a seven-bay, four-storey front and are concerned with the treatment of the attic floor, the top of the portico and door and window details. A windowless attic order, a balustrade, a parapet and cornices are tried out for the third floor while, alternatively, seated lions, urns, arms and tripodal braziers crown the portico. On [SM D5/7/4], [SM D5/7/6], and [SM D5/7/3] the ground floor windows are square-headed, on [SM D5/7/2], [SM D5/7/1] and [SM D5/7/1B] and subsequent drawings they are shown with semicircular heads.
It seems probable that the drawings were made by Lewis or his office and that Dance added, for example, the lettering in the frieze and the sculptured arms.
D. Watkin (Sir John Soane: Enlightenment thought and the Royal Academy lectures, Cambridge, 1996, pp.82-3) quotes Soane's Crude Hints towards an History of my House on the subject of the caryatids that adorn the front of 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields: 'some illiberal persons have asserted that these two old women are to personify/represent the two great architects whose combined talents we are indebted for the great display of fine architecture opposite, where two old men with Greek names on their skirts are represented embracing or rather hugging a sort of shield which they display to the public view, thereby to excite/attract notice and to direct the multitude to contemplate the beauties of that great/conspicuous work' (SM, AL Soane Case 31, published in Visions of ruin: architectural fantasies and designs for garden follies, catalogue of an exhibition at the Soane Museum, 1999). Watkin comments: 'Taken with Soane's own criticisms of the College of Surgeons in his Royal Academy lectures and elsewhere, this passage may suggest that his two Greek caryatids were indeed an ironical comment on the two figures surmounting Dance's pediment. Representing Machaon and Podalirius, the two surgeon sons of Aesculapius, these support, rather incongruously, a large cartouche bearing the College arms. This was carved by Rossi in 1811, the year before Soane ordered his caryatids from Mrs Coade. The dialogue across the Fields between Soane's and Dance's figures underlines the interpretation we have just suggested of Soane's house as a kind of living commentary on the history and theory of architecture from the earliest times to the present day'.
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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).