[12] Presentation drawing of a variant design, showing an alternative bowed rear and an asymmetrical street front, 8 February 1792

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Town houses
  - London: Buckingham House, 91 Pall Mall: (executed) house for 1st Marquess of Buckingham, 1790-1793, (executed) alterations to the library, 1794, and (executed) alterations on the ground and first floors, 1813 (52)
    - Variant designs/presentation drawings, 1792 (7)

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Reference number

SM 33/1/25

Purpose

[12] Presentation drawing of a variant design, showing an alternative bowed rear and an asymmetrical street front, 8 February 1792

Aspect

Plan of the Attic Floor

Scale

bar scale of 1/5 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

(Upper case) as above, The Marquiss of Buckingham, plan labelled (upper case): Chamber (seven times), Coridor (sic), Second / Staircase, Nursery Apartments, The Nursery Apartments, lettered A corresponding to A These Steps are not essentially requisite, and stair risers numbered (pencil) 1 to 5

Signed and dated

Great Scotland Yard Feb^y8^th1792

Medium and dimensions

Pen and black and light pink washes, pencil, within double-ruled and wash border on laid paper (497 x 710)

Hand

Thomas Chawner and Frederick Meyer

Watermark

J Whatman and fleur-de-lis within crowned cartouche and ornate W below

Notes

Soane delivered four fair drawings to the client on 10 February 1792. Soane records in his journal that the drawings were brought back to the office (Journal N^o1). Soane presented an estimate to Lord Buckingham on 14 February, staying with him for two hours. He visited the client again on the 22nd and stayed another two hours.

Made two years after the previous set of presentation drawings (drawings 6 to 9 (SM 33/1/24, SM 33/1/33, SM 33/1/23 and SM 33/1/22)), this design has roughly the same layout but the rooms are more carefully planned and they are better aligned for an axial plan. Also varying from the earlier designs are the front and rear elevations: the front is asymmetric with five bays, and the rear has a wide bowed projection on a shallow segmental plan.

This attic floor plan is also the same as Soane's earlier plan (drawing 9 (SM 33/1/22)). As suggested in pencil on drawing 9, a door is included between the nursery apartments and the adjoining bedrooms. Also as in drawing 9, the east and west sides of the house have different floor levels.

Drawings at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, show preliminary variant designs for the staircase, which probably date from this time. Caryatids and balustrades are pencilled in on the third floor (see du Prey catalogue).

Literature

P. du Prey, Sir John Soane, 1985, in series of 'Catalogues of architectural drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum', catalogue 213-22.

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.

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).