Browse
Regarding drawing 38 (survey plan of the cellars) see drawing 5 for an early design of c.1791 for enlarging them. For later designs see drawings 65 and 79.
Drawing 39 of the ground floor is closest to drawing 22 (1806) with only minor differences. The plans of the four bedroom floors (drawing 40) show 17 bedrooms in all, together with closets, water closets and passages (all numbered from 1 to 27). The 'New Appartments' are on the south side of the house with a mostly top-lit attic and the 'Old Appartments' are on the north side over the domestic offices and with three attic bedrooms. A comparison with the only other bedroom floor plan of the first phase (drawing 4, dated 1791) shows four bedrooms to the polite part of the first floor, three of them existing, and corresponds quite closely with 'Bed Chambers in / New appartments' of drawing 40. 'New' must refer to Dance's work of circa 1791 and presumably 'old' to the existing arrangements. Drawing 41, shows the house without its offices: the three-bay, two-storeys with attic entrance front, the three-bay, two-storeys with dormered attic south front and the smaller north front. Earlier rough drawing 2 (1790, recto and verso) showed the existing south front while drawing 15, made in 1797, is of the west front with the unexecuted bow front to the breakfast or ante-room.
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 Survey drawings of house and offices 'previous to the Alterations in the Year 1808' (4)
- [38] Survey drawing 'previous to the Alterations in the Year 1808', Plan of the Cellars
- [39] Survey drawing 'previous to the Alterations in the Year 1808', Plan of Principal Floor
- [40] Survey drawing 'previous to the Alterations in the Year 1808', Plan of Upper Stories
- [41] Survey drawing 'previous to the Alterations in the Year 1808', Elevation, section and wall section