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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).
Contents of Interior decoration: 1765-76
- Record drawing for a ceiling for the library, 1766, as executed (1)
- Finished drawing for a chimneypiece for the library, 1766, executed with minor alterations (1)
- Preliminary design and alternative record drawings for a ceiling for the saloon, 1767, Adam volume 11/227 as executed (3)
- Finished drawing for the apse head in the saloon, c1770, executed with alterations (1)
- Finished drawing for a chimneypiece for the saloon, 1772, as executed (1)
- Finished drawing for sideboard tables for the saloon and top hall, and working drawing for the table slab for the saloon, 1775, the design for the saloon as executed; the design for the top hall unexecuted (2)
- Record drawing for a ceiling for the drawing room (later the tapestry room), 1767, as executed (1)
- Finished drawing and record drawing for a chimneypiece for the drawing room (later the tapestry room), 1767, as executed (2)
- Preliminary designs and finished drawings for a ceiling and niche head for the top hall, c1766-72, Adam volumes 52/92 and 11/230 as executed (3)
- Record drawing for a pavement for the hall, 1776, unexecuted (1)
- Design for a ceiling for the lobby between the top hall and the saloon, c1766-72, as executed (1)
- Finished drawing for a chimneypiece for an unknown room, 1766; it is not known if this design was executed (1)
- Finished drawing for a picture frame for an unknown room, 1773; it is not known if this design was executed (1)
- Preliminary design for an ironwork balustrade for the top of the new loggia on the east front of the house, 1774, unexecuted (1)
- Finished drawing for a segmental table slab for an unknown room, 1776; it is not known if this design was executed (1)
- Record drawings for friezes, ND, as executed (2)