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Library and Breakfast Room, February 1801 - August 1802 (16)

Signed and dated

  • Main Year: 0

Notes

The designs for the Library were made just after those for the Breakfast Room. Many of the designs within this section show both the Library and the Breakfast Room together, and given the double doors leading directly from one room to another and the similarity of objects displayed within the rooms, it seems evident that the two formed a pair in Soane’s design process.

The earliest designs for the Library interior can really be seen in designs 190 to 193 of the Breakfast Room scheme (later altered to such). The bookcases set within arched niches as in drawings 206 and 207, were reduced in height in the following drawings, providing space for niches to hold busts, cinerary urns and so on. The ceiling from the start takes the form of a ribbed, four-armed 'starfish' ceiling with a section of moulding spatially extending and dividing the room.

The Library was restored at the same time as the Breakfast room, in 1986.

Virginia Brilliant's TS Pitzhanger catalogue has been instrumental to the creation of this catalogue.

Matilda Burn 2010

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Sub-scheme

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).  


Contents of Library and Breakfast Room, February 1801 - August 1802 (16)