[10-11] Design 'No 1 C' (in Soane's hand) in which the Court of Requests is made into a new House of Lords, 'before July 28 1794' and copy (2)

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
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  - London: Palace of Westminster: designs for alterations and additions, 1793-1828 (499)
    - London: House of Lords, Palace of Westminster: official (mostly domeless) designs, July 1794 - February 1795 (134)

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Reference number

SM (10) 36/4/33 (11) 36/4/32

Purpose

[10-11] Design 'N^o 1 C' (in Soane's hand) in which the Court of Requests is made into a new House of Lords, 'before July 28 1794' and copy (2)

Aspect

10 Plan of ground floor 11 Plan of ground floor with a pencilled H, neat copy of drawing 10

Scale

(10-11) bar scales of 1/10 of 1 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

(10) N^o1 (pencil) C, (pen) In this Drawing the Court of Requests is proposed to be / converted into a House of Lords, rooms labelled: The Kings Entrance, Hall, assistant / Clerk of / Parliament, Doorkeeper, Clerk, Clerk / of Parliament, Lord Chancellor, anti / Room, Council / attending / the House, Witness / attending / the House, Passage, Lobby (twice), Sarg^tat / Arms, Doorkeeper, Black Rod, The Lords Entrance, Lord Great Chamberlain, (pencil) over the Lords / Entrance, (pen) Lords / Entrance, Kings Robing / Room, Doorkeeper, Attendants / on the / King, Court, Anti Room, For / Conferences, House of Commons, Lords Robing Room, Attendants / on the / Lords, Anti / Room, Earl Marshall, Bishops, Arch Bishops, Passage, Staircase, Prince of Wales, Duke of Gloucester / &c, Attendants / on the Duke / &c (11) (pencil) H, The River Thames, M^rDelavals House, Abingdon Street, M^rWilberforce, M^rWharton, M^rCowper, M^rRose, Part of King Henry the / Seventh's Chapel, Old Palace Yard, rooms labelled as drawing 10

Signed and dated

(10) (under the black wash of border) designed before July 28 1794 Meyer July 31 1794 Mem The Rough drawing of which is copied from was made / before the 28^thof July 1794 (11) Copy Sept^r1794

Medium and dimensions

(10) Pen, sepia, red, black and burnt umber washes, with quadruple-ruled and black wash border, pricked for transfer on laid paper (735 x 528) (11) pen, sepia, red, black, yellow, green and blue washes with quadruple-ruled and black wash border on laid paper (735 x 525)

Hand

(10) Soane (11) Frederick Meyer (1775-?, pupil April 1791-1796)

Notes

As with earlier drawings Soane includes (in a light sepia wash) some improvements relating to the House of Commons. The chamber and lobby for the Lords is now placed in the old Court of Requests that runs from north to south and the Painted Chamber is to become a conference room. The old House of Lords is now a robing room for the Lords with a room for attendants. The King's Entrance is on the south-west corner and its lobby takes a sharp left turn into the House of Lords. Its distyle portico is balanced by another that gives entry to an ante room and a room for 'Council attending the House'. The Lords Entrance is via (or under?) a room labelled 'Lord Great Chamberlain'. The arrangements seem to be particularly clumsy.

S. Sawyer, 'Soane at Westminster'. PhD thesis, Columbia University, 1999, pp. 166-7, puts drawing 10 (with 2 and 28) as scheme 'B' in Soane's sequence of designs for the House of Lords. The final design (a 'synthesis of two planning approaches' taken from 'A1' to 'A6') includes drawing 11 (Sawyer, p.180).

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).