[5-8] Interior details of the domed design for a new House of Lords (4)

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Office of Works
  - London: Palace of Westminster: designs for alterations and additions, 1793-1828 (499)
    - London: House of Lords, Palace of Westminster: unofficial (mostly domed) designs, 1793 - May 1794 and after February 1795 (58)

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Reference number

SM (5) 16/3/4 (6) 16/3/1 (7) 16/3/2 (8) 16/3/3

Purpose

[5-8] Interior details of the domed design for a new House of Lords (4)

Aspect

5 Plan and section of the Scala Regia, lobby and vestibule 6 Elevation/section for a door framed by Doric columns, with a frieze of notable figures in British history and a large semicircular window 7 Two elevations/sections for the Great Hall of Entrance 8 Elevation of three-bay, Corinthian screen at the end of the Scala Regia and before the lobby and flanking rooms

Scale

(5, 6, 8) bar scales of 1/7 inch to 1 foot (7) to a scale of 1/7 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

5 (feint pencil, against a pencilled-in Corinthian column) Qy (query) large Column

Medium and dimensions

(5) Pen, pencil additions, black, pink and blue washes, pricked for transfer, on thin wove paper (523 x 677) (6, 7) pencil, pen, sepia and pale pink washes, shaded, pricked for transfer on thin wove paper (490 x 325, 494 x 329) (8) pencil, pen, sepia and pink washes, pricked for transfer on thin wove paper (329 x 548)

Hand

(5-8) Soane ?

Notes

Plans 3 and 4 showed a compass-drawn design for the grand entrance of Soane's scheme: curved portico, Scala Regia with large twin alcoves and domed and double-bowed entrance to the House of Lords. Drawing 5 offers a variant design so that, for example, there are 16 niches for statues and the plinths for another six have been moved forward onto the staircase and four columns added to the lobby to make a more formal route to the House of Lords.

For the order shown on drawing 6, Soane employed a baseless Greek Doric, with stopped flutes for the lower one-third of the columns. Drawing 7 has coupled, fluted Ionic columns that appear in Gandy's later interior perspective of 1800 (drawings 53- 54)

Literature, S.Sawyer, Soane at Westminster, PhD thesis Columbia University, 1999, p.230.

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).