[3] Record drawing for a prospect building and a temple

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Country houses, etc.
  - Ossington Hall, Nottinghamshire: designs for garden buildings for John Denison 1786 (8)

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Reference number

SM volume 41/67 verso

Purpose

[3] Record drawing for a prospect building and a temple

Aspect

Two elevations and two plans

Scale

bar scales of approximately 1/13 inch to 1 foot, 1/16 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

N^o 3, Design for a Prospect Building, N^o 5, Design for a Temple, 23:0, John Dennison Esq^r

Signed and dated

after April 1786 (see Notes)

Medium and dimensions

Pen and pencil on laid paper (364 x 244) bound into Precedents in Architecture SM volume 41

Hand

John Sanders (pupil 1 September 1784-90)

Watermark

T French

Notes

In April 1786 Soane provided John Denison with four designs for a prospect tower and one design for a temple, charging 10 gns for the tower and 5 guineas for the temple drawing. SM volume 41/67 verso and SM volume 41/68 are three of those five designs.

The two other prospect tower drawings, as shown in the Denison papers (See R. Hewlings, op.cit, for images) are variants of 'N^o 3': design N^o 1 is a nonagonal plan with a triangular central stairwell, rising six floors in two stages, the fourth storey having bracketed pediments over round-headed windows and a portico on the ground floor; design N^o 2 is on a circular plan with squared ends, rising four floors in two stages and having pedimented windows on two storeys.

Design N^o 3 (SM volume 41/67 verso) has the same plan as N^o 2, with three floors beneath a domed roof, and a balcony with strigilated banisters projecting on the second storey. The final design, N^o 4 (SM volume 41/68) has a four-part plan consisting of four towers around a circular centre, the towers rising over the centre and capped with domed turrets.

The two-storey domed temple design on SM volume 41/67 verso is the same as that sold to the client, having a hexagonal plan with a paired Doric order projecting at three corners.

SM volume 41/67 verso and SM volume 41/68 show alterations made to the drawings in pencil; these alterations, such as round-headed windows on N^o 4 and projecting apse in the temple, were not part of those designs sent to Denison in April 1786. SM volume 41/67 verso and SM volume 41/68, therefore, were made after April 1786 and as documentation of those designs sold to the client.

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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).