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Presentation drawings, 1793 (3)

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These three drawings are related to five drawings in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum (see P. du Prey, op.cit. above). Of those drawings two are side elevations (north and south). Another is a ground floor plan with the same form as SM drawing 1 but with a breakfast room added and the kitchen quarters differently arranged. The other is a variant front elevation with a solid parapet, decorated with festoons, which conceals the roof. There is also at the V&A a detail of the Doric portico dated 22 August 1793 (V&A 3307.63-66, 3307.73). It seems that the Soane Museum drawings and those from the Victoria & Albert Museum are among the 'fair drawings' sent to Mrs Yorke and brought back to the office by Soane (see General Notes above).

Soane's design is for a symmetrical, compact villa with inscribed dimensions of 48 feet 6 inches (which is incorrect and should be about 60 feet) wide by 50 feet deep and with a semicircular (baseless) Doric portico and a three-window, single storey bow (with balcony above) to the circular drawing room on the opposite side. The three-bay villa has two floors above a raised basement and is plain except for the porch, cornice (with T-shaped toothing) and the two ground floor windows set back in a semicircular recess.

The idea of a villa with a circular reception room facing the garden is found earlier in Soane's student designs for a 'large villa' 1779 and a 'hunting casino' c. 1780 (see under Soane's architectural education ... 1778-80).

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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 Presentation drawings, 1793 (3)