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Working drawing for a fanlight in the entrance hall, datable to April 1828 (1)

Notes

Drawing 40 has been torn in half (in Soane's day) to form a folder and lacks the plan mentioned in the inscription. The drawing shows a semicircular fanlight approximately 4 feet high and 10 feet wide. A similar drawing in the archives (j/14/1), located in a measuring notebook for painter's work by William Watson and dated April 1828, shows a similar drawing of a fanlight, specifying the 'yellow glass' shown in drawing 40 and labelled as for the Entrance Wall.

A drawing at the Victoria and Albert Museum shows an interior view of the stairwell looking towards the entrance hall. In the drawing, a fanlight is over a door leading into the entrance hall and there appears to be another fanlight over the front door (Victoria and Albert catalogue 3307.78, see P. du Prey for illustration). Although Soane's designs included a porch in front of the entrance, the form of the projecting porch allowed for an external window directly above the front door (see drawing 9).

Literature

P. du Prey, Sir John Soane, 1985, in series of 'Catalogues of architectural drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum', catalogue 91-99; G. Worsley, 'Pell Wall Hall, Staffordshire', Country Life, 7 April 1988, pp. 134-7.

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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 Working drawing for a fanlight in the entrance hall, datable to April 1828 (1)