[3] Record drawing

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Soane's architectural education: Royal Academy and Italy including measured drawings: 1770-1780
  - Soane's architectural education including theoretical designs made for the Royal Academy Schools and for exhibition at the Royal Academy, 1770-80, and in Italy, 1778-80
    - Copies of a design for a nobleman's town house for the Royal Academy Schools Gold Medal competition, 1774 (4)

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Reference number

SM 45/1/28

Purpose

[3] Record drawing

Aspect

Plan of the principal floor or piano nobile with rooms labelled: library / and / lords dressing room, anti-room, vestibule, drawing room, great eating room, breakfast room, back stairs, great staircase, music room, tribune, common eating room and billiard room

Scale

bar scale of 1/10in to 1ft

Inscribed

rooms labelled as above (in small capitals), dimensions given and titled (by George Bailey, curator 1837-60): Plan of the Principal floor of a Design for a Nobleman's Mansion

Signed and dated

datable to 1774

Medium and dimensions

Pen and sepia washes on laid paper (514 x 729)

Hand

pupil

Watermark

I Taylor, fleur-de-lis within crowned cartouche and GR below

Notes

The subject set for the Royal Academy's Gold Medal in 1772 (sic) was for a 'Noblemans Town House & Offices, upon a Spot of Ground 120 feet wide & 500 Deep consisting of Plans of the different Stories, with the names & Dimensions of the several Rooms: an Elevation of the principal Front & a Section shewing the interior Decoration' . (R.A. Council Minutes, 11 January 1772, quoted du Prey, 1977, op.cit., p.69).

No entries were sent in and the same subject was set in 1774 with the added inducement of scholarships to Italy or Greece. The two-stage examination (see Design for a Temple of Mars) was passed by three students, among them Soane. He, however, got only one out of seventeen votes and thus came a very poor third. In the 1775 Royal Academy annual exhibition, Soane exhibited an 'Elevation for a town house' and a 'Section through the hall' and these must relate to the set of drawings for the 1774 competition. They have not survived and the drawings catalogued above are copies or record drawings by an unidentified pupil, presumably made from the originals, probably in the 1790s (watermark).

Soane's design was for a nine-bay house with 12 giant engaged columns on the front. Internally, there is a double-return stair, an elliptical, top-lit tribune and the back has a bow at each end.

Jill Lever

Literature

P. du Prey, John Soane’s architectural education 1753-80, 1977, pp.69, 72-5
P. du Prey, John Soane: the making of an architect, 1982, pp.74-6

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).