Scale
bar scale of 1¼ inches to 1 foot; (verso) bar scale of 1/2 inch to 1 foot
Inscribed
as above, labelled: House of Lords, Stone and dimensions given; (verso, pencil) 6 Steps - Six Steps - 6 Steps, Centre of / Staircase and dimensions given
Signed and dated
- 28 August 1822
28th August 1822; (verso) 23rd August / 1822
Medium and dimensions
Pen, pink, sepia, yellow ochre and burnt Sienna washes, (verso: pen, pink and sepia washes) pricked for transfer on wove paper (743 x 520)
Hand
Soane Office
Watermark
Smith & Allnutt 1817
Notes
This section shows the coffering of the barrel vault over the third bay of the staircase. The width of the Scala Regia is 9' 9''. On the verso is a plan of the foundations. Sawyer writes: 'errors in his [Soane's] pupils' survey work... required completely redesigning the foundations. The surveys had overestimated the distance between the Prince's Chamber and Wyatt's vestibule by about a foot and a half. This meant that - if the new stairway was to be aligned with Wyatt's work - the south wall of Vardy's structure would have to be entirely cut away, as shown in the subsequent foundation plan [SM 71/2/50v]' (S. Sawyer, Soane at Westminster, PhD thesis, Columbia University, 1999, pp. 404-5). There is also, on the verso of a drawing for the Westminster Law Courts, a fragmentary plan of the foundations, dated 9 August 1822 (SM 37/3/1v).
Level
Drawing
Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation
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).
