[179] Preliminary record drawing, c.1815

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Public buildings
  - London: Royal Hospital, Chelsea for the Board of Commissioners, 1807-1835 (226)
    - Bakehouse, November 1814 - July 1818 (14)

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Reference number

SM volume 76/73

Purpose

[179] Preliminary record drawing, c.1815

Aspect

Chelsea Hospital, View of the New Bakehouse etc (verso) part of an unidentified elevation

Inscribed

as above (verso, pencil) a list of subjects, probably for lecture drawings (including the Bullock Museum - or Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London designed by P.F.Robinson, 1811-12, for William Bullock, naturalist and antiquarian, in a novel Egyptian style)

Hand

Soane office

Notes

This drawing is probably a preparatory watercolour, intended to be worked up into a record drawing. It has been made on the back of another drawing (cropped for the new, smaller sketch).

Behind the Bakehouse itself, the Infirmary's eastern (south projecting) wing can be seen, as well as the east side of the north-south range. To the north (the right) of the Bakehouse, is Wren's Guardhouse, which clearly illustrates Ptolemy Dean's comparison of the two buildings: the Bakehouse ‘elevation, window pattern and cornice were an exact copy of Wren’s guard house’. Soane's building was yellow stock brick and without stone quoining, but the two structures clearly shared remarkably similar dimensions. Part of a demolished building is shown between Wren's Guardhouse and the Bakehouse. A sufficient gap had to be left between the two buildings because of the potential fire hazard.

Literature

P. Dean, 'The Royal Hospital Chelsea I- Pre-1815' in Sir John Soane and London, 2006, p.74

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).