Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  [58] Variant design J for the front elevation, for laying before the Committee for Building, January 1818
  • image SM 48/2/3
Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image
Print this image in A4 view  (icon indicating printer link)

Reference number

SM 48/2/3

Purpose

[58] Variant design J for the front elevation, for laying before the Committee for Building, January 1818

Aspect

Perspective

Inscribed

Design No 3

Signed and dated

  • Lincolns Inn Fields / Jany 1818

Medium and dimensions

Pen, raw umber, sepia, blue, grey and green washes, shaded with single ruled and black wash border on wove paper (452 x 640)

Hand

George Bailey (1792-1860, pupil then assistant, 1806-37, curator 1837-60)

Notes

For the first time the plans include the premises belonging to Messrs Mello, Pead and Company. This makes the site almost a square with only the left-hand boundary wall askew. More offices have been provided for the different functions of the National Debt Redemption Office and the Cenotaph has been located not in the centre as before but left of centre though still on an axis with the entrance. Soane's amendments to the plan include bringing the building forward by 3 feet 4½ inches which is exactly what was gained when the back boundary wall (see SM 48/1/39 and all earlier plans) was regularized. An alternative plan for the front wall is roughed in by Soane and an office hand has drawn out three further varying designs, one for the elevation to Old Jewry and two for elevations next to Meeting House Court.

The perspective shown here offers an alternative design in which there are three storeys rather than four and the ground floor has recessed openings in loggia-like manner. Compared with the elevation (SM 48/2/13) the perspective design is more imposing with fewer but larger windows and an assertive ground floor though the entrances are rather weak. The contrast between the comparatively starved design of SM 48/2/13 and the more robust design here was presumably deliberate. The Committee for Building must have been persuaded by the second of the two designs since further drawings (SM 48/2/20, SM 48/2/10, SM 48/2/22, SM 48/2/21, SM 48/2/25 and SM 48/2/7) follow the three-storeyed, round arched windows and loggia approach.

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).