Record drawing of the vestibule at the base of the Scala Regia

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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 Gallery and Committee Rooms, 1823-24 (66)
        Record drawings of the alterations to the House of Lords

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Reference number

SM volume 61/28

Purpose

Record drawing of the vestibule at the base of the Scala Regia

Aspect

Interior perspective looking towards the Royal Entrance with staffage (soldiers)

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, sepia, green, yellow, red and blue washes with raw umber wash border on wove paper (363 x 255), pasted into volume 61

Notes

The presentation drawings of the new interiors at the House of Lords in volume 61 are arranged in the same way that they would have been encountered on the processional route itself (except for SM volume 61/36), and therefore form a 'virtual', almost cinematic, processional route from the Royal Entrance via the Scala Regia to the Royal Gallery and then into the King's Robing Room.

Having alighted from his carriage under the porte-cochère, the King proceeds into the curved, Gothic Royal Entrance, through a small 'transitional' vestibule, and into the vesitbule at the bottom of the grand flight of stairs known as the 'Scala Regia' which is shown in this view. The vestibule has a groined 'starfish' ceiling with rosette and banded rustication on the lower part of the walls, with recessed arches adorned with ball mouldings and floral bosses framing the royal coat of arms and a bust of George IV. The overdoor cornice incorporates feathers as a reference to the Prince of Wales. The roundels allegorising the rise and fall of Rome survived the fire of 1834 and remain at the Palace of Westminster (S. Sawyer, 'The processional route', in M. Richardson and M. Stevens (eds), Sir John Soane, Architect: Master of Space and Light, 1999, p. 263).

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

John Soane Architect: Master of Space and Light, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 11 September - 3 December 1999; Centro Palladio, Vicenza, April - August 2000; Hôtel de Rohan, Paris, January - April 2001; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, 16 May - 3 September 2001; Real Academia des Bellas Artes, Madrid, October - December 2001

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).