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Purpose

Variant designs and working drawings with segmental pedimented cap, 10-18 November 1801 (8)

Notes

Drawings 168-175 as a group show the next stage of progression in the design process. The cap, consisting of a pendentive dome with segmental pediments on four sides and surmounted by a pine-cone finial, replaces the four-sided triangular pediment, which has now been completely abandoned. All of the drawings show the use of this pendentive dome cap with either a roundel or an ornate wreath relief in the segmental arches: drawing 168 as a detail and the later drawings as part of the whole or part-scheme. The finial ornament of the cap could be a pine-cone and perhaps taken by Soane from the thyrsus, a wand tipped with a pine-cone and an attribute of Bacchus. Soane had earlier used the thyrsus motif for ceilings and chimney-pieces in his designs for dining rooms.

Literature

P. Dean, Sir John Soane and the country estate, 1999, p. 93; G. Darley, John Soane: an accidental Romantic, 1999, p. 158; J. Summerson, 'Sir John Soane and the Furniture of Death', The Unromantic Castle and other essays, 1990, p.135

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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.

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Contents of Variant designs and working drawings with segmental pedimented cap, 10-18 November 1801 (8)