[4a] Preliminary designs (from volume 39, Italian sketchbook) for a dining room on a semi-elliptical plan after the supposed 'triclinium' of Lucullus, together with a design for remodelling the south front, 1779

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Country houses, etc.
  - Downhill, County Derry, Northern Ireland: (unexecuted) summer dining room, alterations and additions for Frederick Hervey, Bishop of Derry and 4th Earl of Bristol, 1778-1780 (11)
    - Four preliminary designs (from volume 39, Italian sketchbook) for a dining room on a semi-elliptical plan after the supposed 'triclinium' of Lucullus, together with a design for remodelling the south front, 1779 (2)

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Reference number

SM volume 39/86v-87r

Purpose

[4a] Preliminary designs (from volume 39, Italian sketchbook) for a dining room on a semi-elliptical plan after the supposed 'triclinium' of Lucullus, together with a design for remodelling the south front, 1779

Aspect

86v. Rough plan for a new dining room on a half-ellipse, the room measuring 36 by 25 feet with two large alcoves to the north and six small ones and with a segmental 'portico' at the west end. Also shown is an existing adjacent room with a canted bay; three internal wall elevations/sections with a domical ceiling and a height to the cornice of 18.0 feet. 87r. Rough elevation of three storeys and 12 bays for the remodelling and enlargement of Downhill's principal front with a piano nobile over a low ground floor (with three Diocletian windows) and with pavilion ends that have a large tripartite window beneath a blind semicircular arch, an attic storey and hipped roof. A giant order marks the divisions of the bays and encloses the bowed terrace against each end wall; a door, approached by a double flight of steps, is shown in the centre bay.

Scale

1/20in to 1ft (86v) bar scale of 1/2in to 10ft (87r)

Inscribed

as above and (86v) This room holds 12 Chairs and calculations

Signed and dated

1779
Some of the other sketchbook leaves (volume 39) are dated 4 January to 24 March 1779

Medium and dimensions

Pencil on laid paper, 2ff of a sketchbook (volume 39, q.v.)

Hand

SOANE, Sir John (1754--1837), architect
Soane

Literature

P. du Prey, John Soane's architectural education 1753-80, 1977, pp.153-7; P. du Prey, 'Je n'oublieray jamais: John Soane and Downhill', Quarterly Bulletin of the Irish Georgian Society, XXI Nos 3 &4, 1978, pp.23-4; P. du Prey, John Soane: the making of an architect, 1982, pp.114-8

Level

Drawing

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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