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The binding of English gilt morocco is lettered on the spine Collection of Drawings Costume &c of the Persians. It also bears Sir John Soane's bookplate. Many of the interleaves are of Whatman paper watermarked with the date 1810. There is a manuscript title: A Collection of Original Drawings Illustrating the Costumes, Manners, & Amusement of the Persians. Nevertheless, most of the album's contents are of Indian origin. 37 folios, mostly Mughal, 18th century. 400 x 310 mm. Assembled in England, c.1810-20.
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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).