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Reference number

SM D3/6/6

Purpose

10 St James's Square, Westminster, c.1814

Aspect

[6] Plan and elevation of bookcase, 25 ft wide in a room also 25 ft wide

Scale

½ in to 1 ft

Inscribed

Drawers / or Shelves / inclosed wn / folding doors and dimensions given

Signed and dated

  • c.1814

Medium and dimensions

Pen and crimson, raw umber, warm sepia and blue washes, shaded on laid paper (320 x 465)

Hand

Dance

Watermark

D & C Blauw IV

Notes

The bookcase is 8 feet high with shelves over low cupboards and consists of nine bays: bays one, three, seven and nine project by 9 inches and are emphasised by slim pilasters supporting friezes crowned by urns, vases and busts. The wall is washed a light crimson that matches the upholstery of a couch with scrolled ends.

The back and front bedchambers either side of the top-lit antechamber or Octagon on the first floor were about 20 feet square while the 'Great Parlour' with its Ionic screen on the ground floor was about 28 by 20 feet and the other rooms on that floor were about 20 by 20 and 18 by 15 feet. It is not certain which room was to be fitted out as a library and neither of the bookcase drawings is inscribed for T. F. Heathcote. However, all six drawings catalogued here for 10 St James's Square are in a folder made from a re-used blank drawing sheet (watermarked D & C Blauw IV) labelled by George Bailey (Soane Museum curator 1837-60) Sketches of a design for a Library &c / for T F Heathcoe Esq.

See also an unidentified design for a bookcase, 1811 or after. This bookcase is 18 feet 6 inches wide and 8 feet 4 5/8 inches high.

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).