[7] Variant design for the theatre, November 1790

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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: King's Theatre (Opera House): designs for an opera house, c.1790 (9)

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Reference number

SM 61/5/6

Purpose

[7] Variant design for the theatre, November 1790

Aspect

Ground floor plan

Scale

bar scale of 3/20 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Plan of the King's Theatre in the Haymarket, Haymarket, Oldhouses, Market Lane 15'7" wide, and dimensions given, (pencil) Horse shoe and calculations

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen and grey and pink washes on laid paper (714 x 584)

Hand

Soane office

Notes

On 6 November Soane met O'Reilly for 2 hours and Chawner delivered to Mr O'Reilly plans showing Novoskielski's and Mr Taylor's intended design for the opera house. Soane had frequent meetings through November concerning the designs of the old and new opera houses. On 18 November, the date of this drawing, he met Mr Sheldon and Mr Witham for 3 hours to discuss the opera. The drawing shows outlines of a design for the theatre and the houses owned by Edward Vanbrugh (descendant of the architect) fronting Haymarket. Vanbrugh owned the ground lease for the theatre. In an attempt to block the reconstruction of King's Theatre, O'Reilly purchased the reversion of the Haymarket ground lease from Edward Vanbrugh in March 1790.

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).