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Record copies of working drawings for the library, 23 October 1789 (3)

Notes

These working drawings appear to follow what seems to be the agreed design of drawing 25. Soane must have been happy with these details since all three drawings were copied to be used as office exemplars. That is probably the reason for Soane's 'Observations' (drawing 26) that the middle and lower rails to the door should have been at least an inch and a half deeper and that the shelf-supporting slots to the narrow bookcase between the window and the door should have been omitted giving more and better space for rolled maps and the like. Thus if that drawing was used again for a different commission, it would have been re-drawn with Soane's improved dimensions. The three drawings are filed (as they would have been in the Soane office) with further examples of working drawings for bookcases along with a great many other joinery details for doors, windows, mouldings and so on.

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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).  


Contents of Record copies of working drawings for the library, 23 October 1789 (3)