[93-95] Sectional designs 'A' (3)

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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 (93) 16/6/3 (94) 16/6/2 (95) 16/6/1

Purpose

[93-95] Sectional designs 'A' (3)

Aspect

93 Londitudinal section labelled Design 'A' 94 'Latitudinal section' labelled 'Design A' 95 Latitudinal or cross section probably 'Design A'

Scale

(93, 95) to a scale of 1/4 inch to 1 foot (94) bar scale of 1/4 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

(93) Design A, rooms labelled: Court of Parliament, The Painted Chamber, Lobby, House of Lords, Staircase, The Lord Chancellor / and Judges, titled: The Section of a Design to render the House of Lords and the Rooms and Offices appertaining thereto more commodious (94) Design A, rooms labelled: The Entrance / for / His Majesty, Serjeant at Arms, Passage, The House of Lords, Doorkeeper and titled (within a Roman label) Latitudinal Section of a Design to render the House of Lords and the Rooms and Offices appertaining thereto more commodious (95) rooms labelled: The Painted Chamber, Passage, Council attending / the House, Entrance / for / His Majesty and titled Design to render the House of Lords and the Rooms and Offices appertaining thereto more commodious

Medium and dimensions

(93) Pen, sepia, pink, blue, brown madder and yellow washes, shaded with quadruple-ruled and sepia and black wash border on laid paper (612 x 1212) (94) pen, sepia, pink, blue, brown madder and yellow washes, shaded with quadruple-ruled and sepia and black wash border on laid paper (611 x 1430) (95) pen, sepia, yellow and blue washes, shaded with quadruple-ruled and sepia and black wash border on laid paper, top left-hand corner missing (606 x 1010)

Hand

(93-95) Frederick Meyer (1775-?, pupil April 1791-1796)

Watermark

(93) J Whatman and J Whatman 1793

Notes

Drawing 95 is completely lacking its left-hand side, that is, the section through the Court of Requests/Parliament.

Drawing 93 has the familiar elements of the Court of Requests (here labelled Court of Parliament), the Painted Chamber and the new House of Lords as found in the earlier sections. The customary portico to Old Palace Yard is not given presumably because it has been superseded by the King's Entrance on the south side of the building. The lobby to the House of Lords varies as it does in earlier designs but new is the easternmost apartment of three storeys having a double-height room with Corinthian columns for the Lord Chancellor and a giant Ionic order for the external elevation. None of the plans (drawings 1-51) seem to correspond exactly with this section though, for example, drawing 36 comes close.

Drawings 94 and 95 are cross or latitudinal sections made from different viewpoints and showing the stepped King's Entrance flanked by statues raised on pedestals. This entrance is on the south side of the building and is shown on plan on drawings 6-8 and 36 to 51.

S. Sawyer, 'Soane at Westminster', PhD thesis, Columbia University, 1999, p. 183 (re. drawings 94 and 95).

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).