[5] Design

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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
    - Designs for a 'Castello d'acqua', August 1779-1780, with later rough alternative designs by George Dance (10)

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Reference number

SM 45/1/21

Purpose

[5] Design

Aspect

Elevation and section

Scale

bar scale of 1/16 in to 1 ft labelled English feet

Inscribed

LO SPACCATO D'VN DISEGNO PER VN CASTELLO D'ACQUA and L'ELEVAZIONE D'VN DISEGNO PER VN CASTELLO D'ACQVA

Medium and dimensions

Pen, sepia, pink and blue washes, watercolour technique, shaded, pencil additions within single ruled border on laid paper (494 x 709)

Hand

Soane and ? Carlo Labruzzi (P. du Prey's attribution)

Watermark

J Whatman, fleur-de-lis within crowned cartouche with GR below

Notes

The elevation has five bays rather than seven (as SM 42/183 recto) and the shallow, stepped dome is crowned by an equestrian statue. Water cascades from within the portico fronted by seven nude statues with urns pouring water into a pool. Water, sculpture and the pretty trees have been added by another hand, identified by du Prey (1982, op.cit., p.365, fn. 24) as Carlo Labruzzi, 1748-1817, a landscape painter who drew and painted views for foreign tourists.

Literature

P. du Prey, John Soane's architectural education 1753-80, 1977, pp.274-8
P. du Prey, John Soane: the making of an architect, 1982, pp.184-6

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).