Fanciful Figures: Library visit

Spend an hour in the Soane Museum Research Library looking at drawings with the curator of our exhibition Fanciful Figures.

Frances Sands, Curator of Drawings and Books, will show you a selection of beautiful drawings which could not be shoehorned into the show. The use of staffage figures in architectural drawings was in full swing by the later decades of the eighteenth century, and so there are numerous beautiful and fascinating examples among the Soane Museum’s collection. During this session we will look at examples from the offices of Robert Adam, George Dance and John Soane himself. We will also peruse examples of architectural publications from this period which use figures. And finally, as a very special grand finale, we will look at an extremely early example of staffage figures in an Elizabethan architectural drawing, by the architect John Thorpe.