Hidden Masterpieces (9 March – 5 June 2022) is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see some of the finest works amongst the drawings collected by Sir John Soane. These are usually kept in locked drawers and among carefully stored volumes at Sir John Soane’s Museum, but this spring, a selection of highlights will be on display for all to enjoy.

 Illumination showing the construction of the Tower of Babel within a Book of Hours, after 1512. Pen, coloured washes and gold on parchment, SM volume 137/26 recto, , Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. Photograph: Geremy Butler. 

Hieronymus Cock, after the circle of Domenico Ghirlandaio, View for an engraving of the Colosseum, Rome, c. 1550, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London.

Unknown hand, Plate depicting Mumtaz Mahal within a volume of Indian and Persian miniatures and calligraphy, early eighteenth century. Pen, opaque watercolour, coloured washes and gold on burnished paper, SM volume 145/9, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. Photograph: Ardon Bar-Hama

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Capriccio, c. 1745–50, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London

Giuseppe Manocchi (c.1731-82) for Robert and James Adam, Plan of a ceiling for the circular dressing room at Harewood House, West Yorkshire, 1767. Pen, pencil and coloured washes on laid paper, SM Adam volume 11/148, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. Photograph: Ardon Bar-Hama

This drawing exemplifies the extraordinarily high standard of draughtsmanship within the Adam office, a result of the Adam brothers never taking apprentices, and instead employing skilled professional draughtsmen from across Europe. The artist, Giuseppe Manocchi, was the Adam brothers’ master draughtsman for eight years. Having studied the work of Raphael in Rome, Manocchi specialised in foliate and figurative motifs, which he introduced to the Adam brothers, along with the vibrant colours which became a signature of their interior decorative style. The drawing offers an unexecuted scheme for the domed ceiling of the circular dressing room – one of two dressing rooms adjoining the state bedchamber – at Harewood House. The Harewood estate had been in the possession of the wealthy West-Indian plantation-owning Lascelles family since 1739, originally with a seventeenth-century house which was rebuilt from 1759.