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- Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
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Notes
The Doric Vestibule in SM volume 73/8 and SM volume 73/9 resembles SM volume 73/5, with facing semicircular alcoves in the north and south arms of the cruciform hall. This drawing and SM volume 73/9 show a similar semicircular form integrated into the loggia, with both ends coved into a semicircular apse around the doorway.
In SM volume 73/8, a stair is shown to the north-east of the Doric Vestibule. In this drawing and SM volume 73/9 the stair has been moved south, freeing up space for the Porter's Lodge. In later drawings, and in the executed design, this east-facing room is enlarged so that it occupies the entire west side of the court.
The note on SM volume 73/8 refers to a survey by William Richards, who was an assistant in Soane's office from 1789 to 1803.
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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.
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).