[32] Perspective to a different design

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Town houses
  - Reading, Berkshire: Friar Street, house for Lancelot Austwick, 1796 (32)
    - Record drawings made later

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Reference number

SM volume 59/102

Purpose

[32] Perspective to a different design

Aspect

Perspective of a two storey (with basement) house that is five bays wide. There is a central entrance reached by stairs and and to each side there is a secondary or garden entrance placed on the front building line.

Inscribed

L. Austwick Esqre Reading

Medium and dimensions

Pen, sepia, burnt umber and blue washes with quadruple-ruled and sepia wash border on laid paper (280 x 394) affixed to p. 102 of volume 59

Hand

Soane office

Notes

A comparison with a photograph taken by Dorothy Stroud before 1959 (SM green files) when the house was demolished shows it to be of two storeys with basement and five bays wide. It has the 'sentry boxes' on each side that appear in the drawing but without pediments and there is a railinging in front of the house. The drawing may represent an alternative design by Soane that differs greatly from drawings [1]-[31] and that was built with modifications. So that, for example, a three-bay front with large windows became a five- bay front with narrow windows. Or, the design shown here was modified by the owner at the time of building or subsequently. No correspondence from or to Soane has been found that would clarify the matter.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

John Soane: Reading's Architectural Hero, Reading Museum, 5 May - 2 September 2007

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).