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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 Designs for the interior decoration, including the great dining room, music room, eating room, drawing rooms and boudoir (59)
- Preliminary design, finished drawing and record drawings for ceiling and walls for the great dining room, ceiling as executed, and walls presumed to have been executed, August 1780 (5)
- Working drawing for the frieze for the great dining room, presumed to have been executed, 29 August 1780 (1)
- Preliminary designs, a finished drawing, and working drawings for the chimneypiece in the great dining room in an Etruscan style, presumed to have been executed, 1780 (6)
- Finished drawing for a sideboard for the great dining room in an Etruscan style, 28 October 1780, presumed to have been executed (1)
- Preliminary design and record drawing for a carpet for the great dining room in an Etruscan style, presumed to have been executed, 1780 (2)
- Preliminary design and working drawing for curtain cornices for the great dining room in the Etruscan style, presumed to have been executed, 1780-81 (2)
- Design and finished drawing for door furniture for the great dining room in the Etruscan style, 1780-81 (2)
- Preliminary design, design and record drawing for the ceiling for the music room, as executed, 1780 (3)
- Design and record drawing for a carpet for the music room, 1780-81 (2)
- Finished drawing and full size working drawing for a console table for the music room, 1780-81 (2)
- Finished drawing for a mirror frame for the music room, 1781 (1)
- Preliminary designs and finished drawings for two alternative designs for an organ case for the music room, April-May 1781 (4)
- Preliminary designs for a fire screen, January-February 1782 (4)
- Preliminary design for the ceiling of eating room, 3 August 1780, unexecuted (1)
- Preliminary design, design and record drawing for a carpet for the eating room, 1780-85, unexecuted (3)
- Finished drawing and record drawing for a grate for the eating room, 1780-85, unexecuted (2)
- Unfinished preliminary designs and finished drawings for the ceiling and walls of the first drawing room, 1780-85, unexecuted (4)
- Preliminary designs for the walls for the second drawing room, 1780-85, unexecuted (5)
- Preliminary designs and finished drawings for the walls for the third drawing room, 1780-85, unexecuted (5)
- Full size unfinished working drawing for part of a pilaster for one of the drawing rooms, 1780-85, unexecuted (1)
- Finished drawing for the boudoir, 1780-81, unexecuted (1)
- Record drawings for friezes for the great dining room, as executed, and for a drawing room, unexecuted, N.D (1)
- Finished drawing for a chimneypiece, c1780-88, unexecuted (1)