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Notes
Drawing 17 shows the basement with nine windows, so presumably it was not intended as a cellar for wine and beer (as shown in drawing 12) but probably as kitchen quarters. However, there was a change of mind for which see drawing 20. Estate agents' sales particulars, 1986 and 1998 (SM green box files) show the basement with six windows (none at the sides or front) that was then being used as a wine cellar but also for a billiard room, boiler room etc.
Drawing 18 (ground floor plan) was evidently copied from drawing 16 since the details and dimensions correspond. The first floor plan shows five bedrooms and (as noted on drawing 12) there are also Garrets in the Roof.
Drawing 19 has a detail for a cornice with dripping eaves. Drawings 13-15 favour a blocking course over a cornice but dripping eaves were used in execution. 'Dripping eaves' are eaves without gutters that overhang a wall and throw rainwater to the ground. An alternative is to have a 'drip' beneath a cornice (or other projection) that is a small projection from which rainwater drips and is thus prevented from running back down the face of the building.
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).
Contents of Working drawing and copies of working drawings, from September 1784 (4)
- [16] Working drawing, from 2 September 1784
- [17] Copy of working drawing, from September 1784
- [18] Copy of working drawing, from September 1784
- [19] Working drawing, from September 1784