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Scale
Inscribed
Signed and dated
- (5-9) datable to late 1814 (see note below) (10) Friday Decr 23rd 1814 (11) datable to January 1815 (12) Wednesday Janry 4th 1815
Hand
Notes
Drawings 8-10 and 11-12 show the point at which the passage turns at a forty-five degree angle. The views show the structure to be built of brick and stone with arches leading the passage into the diagonal route. The original vestibule could not be knocked down completely because it was integrated with other buildings. Thus the diagonal passage had to be built by breaking through the existing masonry and brickwork of the south west corner of the Rotunda.
The drawings are in an octavo sketchbook inscribed on the first page; Sketches of the New Entrance / to the Rotunda at the Bank / from the Pay Hall Court / made during the progress of / the Works in the year 1814-1815. The drawings seem to be ordered chronologically within the volume which means drawings 5-9 can be dated to late 1814 as they appear before drawing 10 dated Decr 23rd 1814.
Level
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).