Working drawing for the cornice, April 1831

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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: New State Paper Office, Duke Street, Westminster, 1829-34 (207)

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Reference number

SM (101) 82/2/26

Purpose

Working drawing for the cornice, April 1831

Aspect

101 Detail and section through the upper part of the elevation

Scale

to a scale of 1 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

New State Paper Office, Battening, Wall Plate and dimensions given

Signed and dated

26 April 1831
26^th April 1831

Medium and dimensions

Pen, sepia, burnt Sienna, blue and pink washes, pricked for transfer on wove paper (342 x 520)

Hand

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

Notes

Drawing 101 shows in detail the sloped, 'pantiled' parapet supported by the bracket cornice, an idea that Soane derived from Vignola's Villa Farnese at Caprarola (D. Stroud, The Architecture of Sir John Soane, 1961, pp. 135-6). This feature screened the roof of the building which was necessarily flat due to the skylights that were designed to illuminate the library and staircases. Further light for the attic storey was provided by windows in the metopes. The frieze is incised with a Greek fret pattern.

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).