Browse
Purpose
Notes
The verso of drawing 105 has a full size detail of the mouldings at the base of the lantern, marked C on the section. It consists of a frieze that resembles the soffit of a Greek order, with panels of ball mouldings alternating with plain panels sunk 1/4 inch. The recto has details for the surbase that surrounds the room at the level of the pilaster capitals.
The ceiling of the lantern has a bell light in its centre, marked 'bell glass' on the drawing. Later drawings also include this detail, indicating that it was executed. Soane's bell lights are usually employed as skylights in tight secondary spaces and so this design is notable.
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).