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Notes
Despite considerable damage in the 1990s owing to water ingress, the ceiling survives in situ and has since been restored (see scheme notes). The surviving ceiling, however, does not include the band of rosettes amid serpentine ribbon around the central medallion. There is some uncertainty as to whether this element was omitted in execution, or was lost during the nineteenth century.
It has previously been claimed that the medallions in the ceiling of the second drawing room were signed by Angelica Kauffman, but this signature has not been found, and the medallions have more recently been attributed to Antonio Zucchi.
Level
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).