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Finished drawings for the plan and south front of the house, 1767-68, executed with alterations (2)

Notes

These designs do not represent the executed house exactly, but nor are they entirely dissimilar either. The plan underneath the flier of Adam volume 43/5 is close to the executed layout which is shown in The works in architecture of Robert and James Adam (1774, Volume I, Part II, plate i), and the south front elevation in Adam volume 43/1 is similar - albeit with slightly alternate ornamentation - to the executed south front shown in a view and elevation in The works in architecture of Robert and James Adam (1774, Volume I, Part II, plates 2-3).

It is important to note that not only the new library wing, and ancilliary rooms behind, were altered, but also the domestic rooms behind the orangery, with a large new servants' hall behind a tripartite window.

The embellishments to the south front were executed by Joseph Rose in 1773, and using Adam's patented Liardet's composition, but this needed considerable repair in 1778, 1781, and 1793. According to Frank Kelsall, Mansfield complained that it cost more to face his house in stucco than if he had used Parian marble. The façade was restored again in 1975, this time using fibreglass, and is once again under restoration now.

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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 Finished drawings for the plan and south front of the house, 1767-68, executed with alterations (2)