Preliminary design

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Soane's architectural education: Royal Academy and Italy including measured drawings: 1770-1780
  - Soane's architectural education including theoretical designs made for the Royal Academy Schools and for exhibition at the Royal Academy, 1770-80, and in Italy, 1778-80
    - Preliminary design for a bath, ? 1778-1780

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Reference number

SM 45/1/18

Purpose

Preliminary design

Aspect

Plan with revisions and rough alternative plan

Scale

bar scale of 1/11 in to 1 ft

Inscribed

Labelled (pencil) Cold, Hall, Dressg / Ro and (by G.Bailey, curator 1837-60) Plan of a Design for a Bath

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen and sepia wash, pricked for transfer, within single ruled border on laid paper (521 x 350)

Hand

Soane

Watermark

J Whatman

Notes

Overall, the plan is triangular with three concave sides (each fronted by a distyle portico in antis) terminating in three rectangular pavilions. Internally, the centre is a circle with three apsidal ends linked to pavilions that house a hall, a cold bath and a hot bath. Pencil amendments make the concave sides straight while the rough alternative plan has three triangular pavilions and straight sides.

Soane used a simpler triangular plan for his design for a dog house see (under Soane's early works) Downhill: County Derry, Northern Ireland: unexecuted alternative designs for a doghouse for Frederick Hervey, Bishop of Derry and 4th Earl of Bristol, 1778-9 and later.

Another triangular plan was employed for a prospect tower at Tortworth, Gloucestershire c. 1796, see P.du Prey, Sir John Soane, 1985 in series of 'Catalogues of architectural drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum) catalogue 118.

Jill Lever, September 2005

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).