Notes
The three surviving sketch/notebooks document only a small part of a tour which began on 18 March 1778 and ended in late June 1780. A notebook with some sketches is dated December 1778 to April and July 1779 (SM volume 164). A sketchbook with notes was mostly used from January to March 1779 (SM volume 39). Finally, there is a notebook with some sketches mostly dated from April to June 1780 (SM volume 162). Thus only nine out of the twenty-eight months that Soane spent abroad are accounted for - some of them very scantily. Of other records made on Soane's tour, there are copies of measured drawings of two buildings in Sicily, but nothing for buildings in Malta, and for France there is only a separate account of the Pont de Neuilly transcribed in 1783 from a now-lost document. Soane's only encounters with antique Greek architecture were at Paestum, recorded in his sketchbook (SM volume 39), and (it is presumed) in Sicily. See also (in Drawings catalogue): Soane in Italy: measured drawings made or copied, 1778-80 and Soane's architectural education including theoretical designs made for the Royal Academy Schools, for exhibition at the Royal Academy, 1770-80 and in Italy: 1778-1780
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).
