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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 Adam Volume 1
- Scotland: Edinburgh, Edinburgh Assembly and Musical Society (designs for concert hall). Design showing a section through a large hall with coffered and coved ceiling supported by pilasters flanking a large columned niche of three bays. On either side are lower sections of niches, panels and sculpture.
- Scotland: Edinburgh, Edinburgh Assembly and Musical Society (designs for concert hall). Unfinished design for a coffered coved niche with pilasters, architrave and cornice at either end. In the spandrels above are winged victories.
- Scotland: Edinburgh, Edinburgh Assembly and Musical Society (designs for concert hall). Unfinished design for a section through a domed hall showing a coffered dome with Greek Key cornice. Below are two coved and coffered niches flanking a pedimented doorway with sculpture on either side and a rectangular relief panel above.
- Design for the elevation of a palace composed as a main block of nine bays arranged over two stories, with a shallow stepped dome on a drum over a central three-bay bow, with two wings linked by a six-bay Doric colonnade to five-bay pavilions showing alternative designs, with pediments and sculpture. Above this is a small plan showing two staircases.
- Italy: Sora, Isola di Liri, Falls of Liri. View showing a large waterfall and bridge with a rocky riverbed below. To the left is an irregular castello with a classical porch, and below are domestic buildings incorporating ancient ruins.
- View of the remains of a circular mausoleum beside a ruined two-bay bridge and archway beyond amongst trees. In the foreground is a ruined overgrown arch with columns, and remains of a pediment.