[39] Design for bookcases (chimneypiece wall)

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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.
  - Stowe, Buckinghamshire: design for library for 1st Marquis of Buckingham, 1805-6 and later unexecuted designs (80)
    - Library
      - Bookcases, shrine, panelling, fixings

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Reference number

SM 33/3/B9

Purpose

[39] Design for bookcases (chimneypiece wall)

Aspect

Design for Bookcases &c for the Gothic Library at Stowe

Scale

to a scale of 1 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

The Marquis of Buckingham, labelled: Plan, bookcase (3 times), Door (twice), Center, G H (twice), Door / to correspond with / Bookcases, Elevation, Floor, Wood (7 times), Metal Work, Shelf (3 times), Bottom, Top, H (3 times), Plastering, Key Hole, Fixed (twice), to open, Springing of Arches, Basso Relievo carved in Wood, (pencil) M^r Astle's Portrait, Chimney Piece, No. 3 and some dimensions given

Signed and dated

May 1805
Lincolns Inn Fields May / 1805

Medium and dimensions

Pen, sepia, pink, green and burnt umber washes, shaded, partly pricked for transfer, on laid paper (508 x 506)

Hand

Soane office

Notes

The drawing shows on the left a vertical bookcase with six shelves that overall is about a foot wide and 11 feet high. Important is the elevation for a bookcase and also for the canopy over the chimneypiece. M.McCarthy ('Soane's "Saxon" Room at Stowe op. cit.' p.136) wrote that the plaster 'moldings and ornaments [were] to be copied from King Henry the VII Chapel at Westminster Abbey'.

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).