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  • image SM 36/2/14

Reference number

SM 36/2/14

Purpose

[16] Variant design for the first floor of a new Parliament House

Aspect

First floor plan

Scale

bar scale of 5/9 inch to 10 feet

Inscribed

labelled: Extends 300 feet - Thames, 232 feet and some dimensions given

Signed and dated

  • 1734-39
    circa

Medium and dimensions

Pen and sepia (brown) wash, pricked for transfer within single ruled border on laid paper (379 x 520)

Hand

William Kent (1685 - 1748)

Watermark

IHS / I Villedary

Notes

As well as the changes mentioned in the note to drawing [15], this design shows a rectangular House of Commons with a curved end and two narrow spiral staircases. The apse of the room in the centre of the eastern half of the building is narrower than in the previous design (drawing [12]).

Both drawings [15] and [16] have been taken to suggest a phased construction as the western part of the building is shown in outline only.

(Salmon, pp. 339-43)

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.

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