[8] Presentation drawing showing the old and new theatres, 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 61/5/3

Purpose

[8] Presentation drawing showing the old and new theatres, November 1790

Aspect

Plan of the Opera House in the Haymarket with the new opera house overlaid in pink wash

Scale

bar scale of 1/14 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

as above, The Parts colored Black shew the / Walls of the old Opera House. / The Parts colored lighter shew the / appendages to the old Opera house. / The Part colored Blue shews the / Premises purchased of Mess^r^s / Dayrell by M^rTaylor in June 1790 // The Parts colored red shew the Walls / of the new Opera House, A. This Wall is nearly situated as shewn / in this Plan, plan labelled N, S, E, W, Market Lane, Haymarket, Union Court, dimensions and calcualtions given

Signed and dated

Albion Place Nov^r1790

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen and black, grey and pink washes, within double-ruled black wash border on laid paper (590 x 470)

Hand

Soane office

Watermark

Portal & Bridges and fleur-de-lis within crowned cartouche with GR below

Notes

The new theatre, shown in pink wash, has a proscenium arch measuring 43 feet 5 inches wide. The theatre is 75 feet 3 inches deep, from the procsenium to the furthest box. The building itself is 168 feet by 92 feet 4 inches and sits behind a symmetrical curtain wall facing Market Lane. The narrow entrance front of the old theatre is shown unaltered, perhaps indicating that it was preserved in the fire.

On 24 November Soane visited Mr Richards and left with him two 'fair plans' of the opera house in Haymarket (Journal N^o1).

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).