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Design and working drawings for the library showing ceiling as executed, one dated 5 January 1803 (2)

Notes

As in drawing 26 and the final design, the centre space is on a square plan. The ceiling is as executed, with a flat circular centre surrounding a rosette and raised on a fluted ring and pendentive corners. The rounded alcoves at each end are lined with bookcases.

Drawing 29 follows the same plan, with the joinery work in pink wash. Instructions are given for the room's finishings, specifying that the radius of the alcoves should be 'as large as possible without cutting into the face of the work' and that the circular recess at the centre of the room should be 'as large as the timbers will admit'.

Drawings 28 and 29 are similar and were probably made in January 1803. Drawing 29 is dated January 1803 in Soane's hand. Drawing 28 is inscribed '1802' by George Bailey, the first curator of the Soane Museum, and it is likely that his 19th century inscription is not accurate.

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Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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.

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Contents of Design and working drawings for the library showing ceiling as executed, one dated 5 January 1803 (2)