Scale
10 feet to 7/16 inch approx. (drawn scale)
Inscribed
In pen and brown ink with names of rooms and areas within new plan, and of existing areas, e.g., on left, French Chapel and Duke of Marlborough and Court for the Queen's Chapel and the adjoining courtyard of Marlborough House, and Pallmall below; and in pencil at bottom right in a c18-19 hand, Plan of a Design for a Palace at S.t James's. N.o 1. ; and with pencil notes in a C20 hand below entrance; and on verso in pen and brown ink in an early C18 hand, on left side, horizontally, at edge of second folded compartment from bottom (originally on the outside of the drawing when folded three times), plan for a pallas / at St Jamisas [sic]
Signed and dated
Medium and dimensions
Pen and brown ink over pencil under drawing; on laid paper, folded into eighth-parts, and reinforced on verso with C19 wove paper patch repairs, the glue stains showing through; 476 x 573
Hand
Unidentified Office of Works hand
Watermark
Strasbourg bend / LVG = IV
Notes
In the first proposal for the new palace, the overall width to the Kings Garden (St James's Park) is inscribed as 472 feet. The internal planning is not fully worked out. No doors or hearths are shown and the royal apartments facing the park are undivided spaces. The pen corrections to the dimensions of the courtyard point towards the enlarged plan in 2 and 3. The court is to be increased in width from 131 feet wide by 163 deep to 167 feet square. This is the dimension of the central courtyard in the corresponding ground plan, 2.
Level
Drawing
Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation
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
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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
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work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of
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