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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 21
- View of an irregular group of ruined, battlemented towers over a single arch, with another arch over a river. In the distance are two ruins, one of which is a circular mausoleum.
- Unfinished capriccio showing an asymmetrical building with a domed circular tower of several stories above a portico with segmental portico on a basement. To one side is a wing of colonnades and pyramid, and to the other a smaller arcaded wing. In the foreground is an equestrian statue.
- Unfinished capriccio showing a large palace with a pyramid, with a domed tower behind. On the right of the sheet is another tower with columns and colonnades. Overdrawn at the centre of the sheet is a statue on an inscribed pedestal.