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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).
Contents of Four related presentation designs for chimney pieces, broadly proportioned, and coloured in similar pink, grey and yellow washes
- [1] Design for a chimney-piece with displays of porcelain on the overmantel and above the fire surround, and with draped upholstery across the overmantel
- [2] Design for a chimney-piece with a large martial relief of putti and arms in the overmantel, a central pedestal frieze with a relief of a Roman battle scene, and a fire surround carved with caryatids, herm figures, drapery and trumpets.
- [3] Design for a chimney-piece with herm figures in the fire surround, perched birds and a tympanum with an infant Hercules on the mantel piece, and an overmantel bordered by swags of fruit and flowers suspended from ribbons
- [4] Preliminary design for overmantel bordered by a strapwork and leatherwork with ribbon-like framing, drops of fruit and flowers and a large central cresting of floral motifs