[67-71] Four alternative designs for a seven-bay river front, one dated 13 August 1794 (5)

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Office of Works
  - London: Palace of Westminster: designs for alterations and additions, 1793-1828 (499)
    - London: House of Lords, Palace of Westminster: official (mostly domeless) designs, July 1794 - February 1795 (134)

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Reference number

SM (67) 36/4/11 (68) 36/4/13 (69) 36/4/9 (70) 36/4/3 (71) 36/4/1

Purpose

[67-71] Four alternative designs for a seven-bay river front, one dated 13 August 1794 (5)

Aspect

67 Design with pediment
68 Design with Ionic order with dosserets
69 Design with 12 Ionic columns, (verso, pencil and feint pencil) elevations
70 Design as drawing 69
71 Design with rusticated, three-bay attic storey, and (feint pencil) elevations

Scale

(67-69) bar scales of 1/20 inch to 1 foot (70-71) to a scale of 1/20 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

(67) (feint pencil) B
(68) (feint pencil) B Elevation
(71) (feint pencil) Lion & Trophy, Unicorn & Trophy, Attic ----- (illegible)

Signed and dated

(69 verso) 13 August 1794

Medium and dimensions

(67-69) Pen and sepia wash, shaded, with quadruple-ruled and sepia wash border on laid paper (282 x 470, 283 x 469, 278 x 452) (70) pen, raw umber and sepia washes, shaded on wove paper (283 x 450) (71) pen and sepia wash, shaded with quadruple-ruled border on laid paper (223 x 411)

Hand

(67-71) Frederick Meyer (1775-?, pupil April 1791-1796)

Watermark

(67, 69, 71) J Whatman (68) fleur-de-lis above cartouche with bar and below an ornate W

Notes

All the designs are of seven bays (145-150 feet wide) and have six windows and a central door in a rusticated basement. Drawing 67 has two-bay wings and a three-bay, two storeys centre with four Ionic columns that support a pediment. Drawing 68 has a similar composition but without a pediment, instead the four Ionic capitals are extended by dosserets that each support a statue. Drawings 69 and 70 share the same design in which windows 1, 3-5 and 7 are framed by Ionic columns and the pedimented, three-bay attic storey rises above the architrave-cornice. Drawing 71 has pediments to the end bays and a three-bay centre with eight Ionic columns supporting a rusticated attic storey crowned by a tablet and trophy. All the designs have skyline ornament of sculpted trophies and figures.

A comparison of elevations with plans shows that drawing 71 with a riverside elevation of seven bays and eight columns corresponds with (plans) 23-25.

S. Sawyer, 'Soane in Westminster', PhD thesis, Columbia University, 1999, p. 189 drawing 69 verso, p. 190 drawings 70 and 71, p. 191 drawings 67 and 68.

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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).