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Purpose
Notes
The verso of drawing 12 shows a rough design of a larger portico for the north front. It has four Doric columns and spans across three bays of the house.
The portico on the recto of drawing 12 was built by Soane in 1791, constructed of Coade stone and, according to Soane's archives, 'based on the Temple of Apollo' (P. Dean, p.182). This drawing was made after the portico was built. Soane made minor alterations to the house, including a new chimney-piece, repairs, furniture restoration and picture cleaning. Building works on the house and the new office wing amounted to £2,663 9s 7d.
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).