[8] Presentation drawing for finishings to the new drawing room

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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.
  - Pembroke Lodge, Richmond Park, London: (possibly executed) stables, (executed) drawing room wing, offices, and (unexecuted) alterations, for the Countess of Pembroke, 1788 (17)

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Reference number

SM 29/3/1

Purpose

[8] Presentation drawing for finishings to the new drawing room

Aspect

Interior perspective looking south

Inscribed

(Bailey) The Countess of Pembroke

Signed and dated

(Bailey) 1788

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen and grey, blue and green washes on wove paper (530 x 333)

Hand

Soane office, and titles added later by George Bailey (1792-1860, pupil and assistant 1806-37, curator 1837-60

Notes

The proposed drawing room is at the north-west corner of the house, overlooking westerly views of the Thames. The room is on a unique plan, essentially being a square space surrounded on four sides by coved alcoves of varying dimensions. The room is lit by three windows to the north and two to the west. A fluted chimney-piece is centred on its east wall.

This drawing and SM 29/3/2 show the (proposed) interior finishings of the new drawing room. A wallpaper resembles the wire cage of an aviary, the sides overgrown with vines. Some of the vines are shown to continue upwards on the coved corners of the ceiling, executed either in paint or wallpaper. A basket is depicted in the centre of the south wall). English decorative painters John and Frederick Crace (1754-1819 and 1779-1859, respectively) worked for Soane at Woburn Abbey, Althorpe, the Bank of England, and Aynhoe Park, as well as at Soane's own Breakfast Room at 12 Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1792. At Lincoln's Inn Fields, the Crace brothers painted a trellised ceiling similar to that shown here for Pembroke Lodge. It is possible, then, that the Soane commissioned the Craces for Pembroke Lodge.

The ceiling has a unique tent-like form consisting of ten vaulted triangular panels radiating from a central roundel. This drawing shows the room with a green carpet.

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).