Preliminary 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 42/135: John Soane (1753-1837): Bath-house for (?) Thomas Pitt at Hereford Street, Westminster, London, c.1779

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Reference number

SM volume 42/135 recto and verso

Purpose

Preliminary design

Aspect

Plan and elevations and (verso, pencil) perspective of an alternative design

Scale

bar scale of 1/16 in to 1 ft

Inscribed

Bath, Loggia, Copper, A dressing room / 15 by 9, lighted / by a skylight and some dimensions given

Signed and dated

datable to c. 1779 ?

Medium and dimensions

Brown pen, pencil, hatching on laid paper with one fold mark (233 x 170)

Hand

Soane

Notes

du Prey (op.cit.) has suggested that the bath-house was designed to be placed next to Thomas Pitt's house in Hereford Street, London but that it was not executed. The commission, if such it was, could have been made in about August 1779 when both men were in Italy. Soane carried out alterations and additions to some properties belonging to Pitt (later 1st Baron Camelford) between 1781 and 1786 (see, for example, 42/127).
See also (Soane's early works ...) London: Hereford Street, Grosvenor Street, Westminster: Unexecuted designs for the Society of Dilettanti and for a library for Lord Camelford, 1784-5

Literature

P.du Prey, John Soane: the making of an architect, 1982, pp.124-5; D.Stroud, Sir John Soane, 2nd ed., 1999, p. 280

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).