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Some of this furniture was executed. The central, rectangular pier glass is similar to those executed for the library, and which remain in situ. The two oval mirrors are similar to those executed by George Burns and Sefferin Nelson for the dining parlour and the hall, but are both now lost. The curtain cornice, however, does not correlate with any known executed feature for the house. All of the furniture for the hall was executed by Sefferin Nelson, and billed for in 1773. The sideboard table shown here differs from the executed version which has a fluted table rail, guilloche along the edge of the slab, and a peltoid shield at the centre of the apron. The wine cooler was executed in mahogany, and with a central lion mask, and the pedestals were ornamented with a central rosettes, and bands of acanthus leaves. Since their sale in 1922 the sideboard table, wine cistern and pedestals have been reassembled in the hall at Kenwood, albeit without the original urns. There is some confusion as to the original location of this furniture, as it is labelled for a dining room, and it is therefore unclear whether it was intended for the dining parlour, or the hall. Although these pieces now reside in the hall, when they were first reacquired for the house they were installed in the dining parlour.
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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).