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  • image SM 65/3/9
Drawing. SM 65/3/9. ©Sir John Soane's Museum, London. Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama

Reference number

SM 65/3/9

Purpose

[5] Alternative design for the temple

Aspect

Elevation; plan; rough plan; and unfinished elevation; (verso) plan of unidentified house

Scale

bar scale of 1/10 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

9:0 (twice), 1:6, 1:1½, 6:0

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen and wash on laid paper (530 x 452)

Hand

Soane office and Soane

Watermark

J Whatman and fleur-de-lis over cartouche with W below

Notes

SM 65/3/9 is a preliminary design for the temple as in SM volume 41/67 verso. Pencil alterations were added to SM 65/3/9 to show a variant design with an additional storey, as developed in SM 65/3/13.

The temple is on a hexagonal plan with Doric projections at three corners. SM 65/3/9 has a round stairwell in the centre. Laying-out lines in pencil are included on the drawing, suggesting its use as a preliminary design.

The pencil alterations to SM 65/3/9 include a straight-stair at the back wall, and apsidal ends on those walls facing the Doric projections. A front stair has been added leading to paired Doric columns, suggesting the removal of the entrance to a door between the paired columns; SM 65/3/13 shows such an adjustment, with a window occupying the large front wall and the Doric columns framing doorways. Also in pencil on SM 65/3/9, and developed in SM 65/3/13, is an additional storey comprised of a circular-plan Ionic peripteral arrangement beneath the domed roof. A figurative statue has been added in pencil to the dome's finial in SM 65/3/9 (as in lecture drawing 14/4/3).

This drawing has a rough plan for a temple on a hexagonal plan, with one wall framed by paired columns on canted ends.

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).