[2] Design for window sashes in the hothouse, datable to August 1792

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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.
  - Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire: alterations to house and estate buildings for Philip Yorke, 3rd Earl of Hardwicke, 1790-1794; presentation drawing 1800; surveys 1818 (70)
    - Estate buildings, 1792-1794 (42)
      - Designs for a hothouse, 1792 (5)

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Reference number

SM 8/3/24

Purpose

[2] Design for window sashes in the hothouse, datable to August 1792

Aspect

Section of the Sashes & Timbers to the Hothouse; rough elevation and plan of a hothouse with a loggia; rough plan of a hothouse with a semicircular-plan lobby

Scale

2 Inches to a Foot

Inscribed

as above, The Earl of Hardwicke, Wimple, Copping / Upper Sash / Middle Sash / lower Sash, (pencil) Shed (four times), Green, Hothouse, dimensions given

Signed and dated

August 1792
Great Scotland Yard 1792
Datable to August 1792 in accord with drawing 1 and Daybook entry

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen and pink wash on laid paper (489 x 385)

Hand

Attributed to Thomas Chawner (1774 - 1851), draughtsman
attributed to Thomas Chawner (pupil 1788-94)

Watermark

B and fleur-de-lis

Notes

Drawing 2 is a detail for the hothouse's glass walls and lean-to roof. The continuous glazing has three layers in order to successfully retain heat within the building. As shown in section on drawings 1 and 3, the taller back wall of the greenhouse had no glazing and was made of brick.

The margins of the sheet have alternative designs for larger garden buildings. One has a two-storey building fronted by a colonnaded loggia and between hothouses.

The office Daybook of 1792 records that Thomas Chawner and Frederick Meyer were 'drawing sections of Hot house at Wimp[o]le' on 15 August. Soane delivered to Lord Hardwicke a design for the hothouse the next day, together with drawings of 'parts at large', probably drawing 2. Soane notes in the book that the drawings were returned.

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).