Design for the ceiling of the first bay of the Scala Regia, August 1822

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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: alterations and additions, 1817-28 (220)
      - Royal Entrance and Scala Regia, 1822-23 (68)
        Designs for the ceiling of the Scala Regia, August 1822

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Reference number

SM 71/2/52

Purpose

Design for the ceiling of the first bay of the Scala Regia, August 1822

Aspect

Plan and Section of a Design for the Ceiling of the Scala Regia; (verso) plan and laid out wall elevations of a Royal Gallery

Scale

to a scale; (verso) bar scale of 1/6 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

as above, labelled: House of Lords; (verso, pencil) Door (twice), ----- (illegible)

Signed and dated

August 1822
August 1822; (verso) 2^d August 1822

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pink and sepia washes (verso: pen, pink, sepia and blue washes), pricked for transfer on wove paper (675 x 523)

Hand

Arthur Patrick Mee (1802 - 1868)
Pupil January 1818 - November 1823.

Watermark

1821

Notes

The ceiling of the first bay of the Scala Regia is barrel-vaulted and coffered. The coffers are decorated with rosettes, ball mouldings and acanthus leaves (shown full sized in SM 71/2/55) and this design owes something to the Arch of Septimius Severus as engraved by Desgodetz (S. Sawyer, Soane at Westminster, PhD thesis, Columbia University, 1999, p. 408). In the centre is a large rosette with a female mask. It does not appear to be the same as a rosette that was used throughout Soane's house at Lincoln's Inn Fields, which was based on an ornament from the Temple of Vespasian in Rome.

The verso of the drawing shows a design for the Royal Gallery, part of Soane's intended 'National Monument' (see drawings 71/2/65-66). The Gallery consists of three equal cross-vaulted bays lit by a clerestory of semicircular windows, with niches for statues in the walls and columns on either side of the room. The room is entered through two closely-grouped pairs of columns (to the left of the drawing).

Level

Drawing

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

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

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).