Scale
bar scale of 1/5in to 1ft
Medium and dimensions
Pen, sepia, green, light red washes, shaded, pencil within single ruled and burn umber wash border on laid paper (481 x 709)
Hand
Soane, trees by another hand?
Watermark
J Whatman, fleur-de-lis within crowned cartouche with GR below
Notes
Previously catalogued (Concise Catalogue) as a 'casino' this has been prefered to 'villa' though 82 feet seems overly large for what is meant to be a compact building. However, the design does relate to Soane's other designs for casinos and, judging by the lack of windows, the rooms may have been large but few in number. Soane set his unfinished elevation in a hilly Italian landscape with a variety of trees including: Lombardy poplars, cypress, stone pine and a palm tree (probably brushed-in by another hand) and there is a glimpse of an Italianate farm building; the sky is not washed in. As has been said, the building is 82 feet wide and there is no indication of a basement, nor are there any mezzanine windows to interrupt the calm and monumental front with the door and main windows of equal width (five feet) and height (10 feet). The order is Ionic and between the columns and above the three centre openings are large roundels, two decorated with festoons. Soane may have intended this unfinished drawing to be among the five that he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1781. A little later, it may have been a source for one of his designs for Tendring Hall, 1784.
Level
Drawing
Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation
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).
