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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 Soane's sketchbooks
- Welcome to the Online Catalogue of Soane's sketchbooks
- General notes on sketch/notebooks by John Soane and allied material relating to his tour abroad, 1778 to 1780
- 1. 'Miscellaneous Sketches 1777', largely by Henry Holland (SM volume 38)
- 2. An account of the Pont de Neuilly and the proposed Pont Louis from Soane's visit to Paris, 1778 (SM volume 41)
- 3. 'Italian Sketches and Mema,' 1778-9 (SM volume 164)
- 4. 'Italian Sketches,' 1779 (SM volume 39)
- 5. Rough plan and sections of a semicircular dome on an octangular plan, drawn by Soane in Sicily, 1779 (SM Priv.Corr.III.B.2.14)
- 6. 'Notes Italy & Italian language &c', 1780 (SM volume 162)
- 7. 'Letters from Italy ...' by Lady Miller, 1777, annotated by Soane, 1778-80
- 8. 'Itinéraire des Routes les plus fréquentées ... ' by Louis Dutens, 1777, annotated by Soane, 1780
- 9. 'Downhill' 1780-1, (SM volume 80) no photos for 22e-24v and 47v-42v - is this intentional?
- 10. 'Miscellaneous Sketches', 1780-2 (SM volume 40)