[1] Preliminary design for a prospect tower

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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.
  - Ossington Hall, Nottinghamshire: designs for garden buildings for John Denison 1786 (8)

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Reference number

SM 65/3/1

Purpose

[1] Preliminary design for a prospect tower

Aspect

Perspective; (verso) rough crescent-shaped plan

Inscribed

(verso) John Denison Esq. Leeds

Signed and dated

Soan

Medium and dimensions

Pen and coloured washes, including olive green, grey and sepia, pencil, within triple-ruled and wash border on laid paper (264 x 201)

Hand

Soane

Watermark

(part) fleur-de-lis within crowned cartouche with W below

Notes

This drawing has a tower on a circular plan rising from a three-bay single-storey front. The three ground floor bays are separated by pilasters supporting urns, which are connected by swags that form an entablature. The end bays have projections in front, presumably boxes for plantings. The austere circular tower, finished with a simple roof and glazed windows, does not correspond with the decorative façade. The temple is shown on the edge of a wooded landscape.

'Leeds' (verso) is the Leeds Coach, by which Soane sent off his drawings to Dennison.

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).