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Reference number
Purpose
Aspect
117 Copy of flank (south) elevation of 17 bays
118 Copy of flank (south) elevation of 17 bays
119 Copy of flank (south) elevation of 15 bays and (verso) very roughly drawn plan and elevation by Soane
Scale
Inscribed
(117) The House of Lords / The Elevation of a Designs for the Entrance Front / To the Right Honble WILLIAM PITT, Chancellor of the Exchequer &c &c / This and the [space] Designs following for rendering the House of Lords / and the Rooms & Offices appertaining thereto more commodious / is inscribed by his much obliged & obedt servt / [signed by] John Soane
(118, 119) The House of Lords / Design for the Entrance Front / (pencil) 1794
Medium and dimensions
Hand
Watermark
Notes
The massing of the four designs is similar, that is, three projecting bays at each end, recessed intermediate three bays and a projecting centre of three or five bays. Drawings 116 to 118 are of two storeys with a rusticated ground floor with square windows and two ancillary doors. The centre of 116 has a pair of Composite columns on either side of the entrance, 117 has four Composite columns and 118 has four Doric columns on a semicircular plan. The end bays of 117 and 118 each have a three-bay parapet that supports four statues. The centre bays of all four designs are each crowned by a lateral, stepped pedestal with wreath and two lions and Boudica with chariot and horses. Drawing 119 is of three storeys with a rusticated ground floor, the three end bays with four Ionic colums supporting a pediment, the centre with two pairs of Composite capitals.
Level
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).