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As in the executed design, drawing 30 shows a bowed front faced with a segmental portico of giant Ionic columns supporting an entablature that wraps around the building. The corners of the building are marked by paired pilasters with corresponding projecting entablatures. The ground floor is faced with a banded rustication. Between the ground and first floor windows are panels decorated with a Greek key pattern. Varying from the executed, drawing 30 omits an attic storey crowning the portico and four figurative statues (probably Coade stone) crown the parapet in alignment with the Ionic order. The drawing also shows recumbent lion statues placed on plinths in front of the building. Mouldings on the drawing date from September 1794, with the cornice approved.
Drawing 31 shows a design similar to drawing 30 but with the Ionic order rising only to the first floor and supporting a smaller entablature that forms a string course around the building under the first floor windows. The design does not have paired pilasters marking its corners. As in drawing 30, there is no attic roof above the parapet.
Drawing 32 has a design that is closer to the executed version, with the hipped roof visible. Unlike the executed building, however, the attic storey is not raised behind the portico parapet. As in drawing 31, the balustraded parapet has four figurative statues and plinths fronting the building support lion statues.
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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.
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 Presentation drawings of three variant designs for the entrance front, 20 September 1793 (3)
- [30] Presentation drawing of variant design for the entrance front, 20 September 1793
- [31] Presentation drawing of variant design for the entrance front, 20 September 1793
- [32] Presentation drawing of variant design for the entrance front, 20 September 1793