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Record copy of design for a chair, 12 August 1790 (1)

Notes

The chair is a side or single chair (that is, without arms) with a drop-in rush seat. The frame is probably of beech, the spindles and stretchers turned to simulate (?) bamboo, and painted white picked out in green. The overall height is 2 feet 11 3/8 inches, 1 foot 6 inches from floor to seat rail, 8 ½ inches from floor to front stretcher, 1 foot 3 inches across the top rail, and the tapered drop-in seat is 1 foot 1 7/8 inches (back) and 1 foot 6 7/8 inches (front).

A lightweight chair of this sort may have been used in the bedrooms or taken out in the garden on fine days.

The drawing (perspective only) was published by P. Ward-Jackson in English furniture designs of the eighteenth century (for the Victoria & Albert Museum), 1959, plate 305
with a note (p.64) that 'No chairs have been traced corresponding with this design, but there are some chairs still at Shotesham in a very similar style, probably made from designs by Soane. (information kindly supplied by Mrs Fellowes through Miss Dorothy Stroud.)'

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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 copy of design for a chair, 12 August 1790 (1)