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Reference number
Purpose
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Inscribed
Signed and dated
- 1813-14
Medium and dimensions
Hand
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Notes
Verso
Plan of a dairy with a Greek cross plan and with octagonal or chamfered-square centre with four corner alcoves
Scale: ½ in to 1ft
Red pen, pencil
The building is small: internally, the domed centre is 10 feet 6 inches square, the wings 5 feet wide and the overall length of the building is 30 feet 6 inches (the walls are 1 foot 6 inches thick). Windows have been roughed in for two of the wings, shelves line the walls, and there is a drain.
Dance's design was not executed and Samuel Reynolds took over (letter of 7 January 1815, ASH 2892). Accounts from the mason, Robert Spiller, for work done under the direction of Reynolds, 18 January to 16 December 1815, are largely to do with the dairy and mostly involve the re-using of old marble including old marble tables from the entrance hall, with another bill signed 'Exd [examined] James Carter' (ASH 2835). Presumably a 'lash up' job was speedier and less expensive than Dance's Neo-Classical proposal and in any case Lord Ashburnham and his architect had a falling out about this time.
Level
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).