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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 alterations to the house, and various gateways and screens (10)
- Finished drawings for the layout of the house, with the intended alterations highlighted in pink, 1785, unexecuted (4)
- Unfinished record drawing for the principal front of the house, c1785-86, unexecuted (1)
- Finished drawing for a gateway, executed with alterations, 30 March 1785, unexecuted (1)
- Alternative designs for iron railings for enclosing the court, c1785, unexecuted (1)
- Finished drawing for a screen of columns, 1786, unexecuted (1)
- Preliminary designs for the end of a terrace forming part of the forecourt to Cumberland House, 1787-88, unexecuted (2)