Sketch design

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- 'Original Sketches / Miscellaneous / Architectural / Subjects': album with 195 drawings by Soane, Dance, Holland and others, dated c.1757 to 1818 (volume 42)
  - Volume 42/126: John Soane (1753-1837): Unidentified building type of 15 bays in the countryside

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Reference number

SM volume 42/126

Purpose

Sketch design

Aspect

Elevation of a 15-bay building, the nine-bay, two-storey centre with a hexastyle portico is flanked by three-bay wings (almost as wide as the centre) each with three very tall and wide arched openings. The right-hand wing has a colonnaded upper storey with a dome. At each end is the profile of a porticoed entrance

Inscribed

Medium and dimensions

Brown pen on laid paper with three fold marks (201 x 252)

Hand

Soane

Watermark

? Taylor (pasted down)

Notes

The sketchy indications of a landscape suggest a country site and the drawing has been listed in the past as a 'design for a large country house'. The discordant scale of the centre to its wings and particularly to the tall domed wing is worrying as is the asymmetrical affect of the latter. However the left-hand wing has some sketchy vertical lines that suggest an alternative balancing storey to the right-hand domed structure. A noticeable feature is the number of entrances and the general permeability of the design. If this is a public building, it is difficult to establish its function. Mausolea were built in the countryside but this design does not relate to Soane's other designs for that building type. For ? related designs see 42/132.

Level

Drawing

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

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).