[39] Finished drawing for the exterior of Holy Trinity Church, Marylebone, London, 17 April 1822

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Churches and chapels
  - London: Holy Trinity Church, Marylebone, designs for construction and interiors, 1820-34 (120)
    - Designs and finished drawings for the exterior of Holy Trinity Church, Marylebone, London, 1822 (14)

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Reference number

SM 54/3/2

Purpose

[39] Finished drawing for the exterior of Holy Trinity Church, Marylebone, London, 17 April 1822

Aspect

This perpective of a five-by-nine bay church within a landscape is similar in most respects to SM 54/3/3, but with the following exceptions: some of the metopes have been blanked, the base of the tower has a roundel at the front, the entablatures has Soane caps and pinecone finials, and the sarcophagi have been removed, the second tier of the tower is square with triple slit windows and has decorated segmental pediments, the third cylindrical tier is taller. The attic roof has a plain front. The major additions are pairs of free-standing sculpted figures with sarcophagi between them, on each side of the tower and the rear, and a sarcophagus has been placed on the base to the tower

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

Sketch for a design for a church to be erected in the / Eastern Division of the Parish of St. Marylebone.

Signed and dated

17 April 1822
Lincolns Inn Fields / April 17^th. 1822.

Medium and dimensions

Pen, wash, coloured washes of light blue, brown, green, olive green, Payne’s grey, sepia, stone, and yellow within a quintuplet ruled border, on wove paper (499 x 352)

Hand

Probably Soane Office, draughtsman

Watermark

JAMES WHATMAN TURKEY / 1819

Notes

This well executed perspective of the Church is also notable for the amount of free-standing sculptural adornment, including figurative, to the roofline. The use of standing figures standing in hieratic poses and sarcophagi on plinths was a feature of Soane's unexecuted sepulchral chapel for Tyringham Hall from 1799-1800 (see SM P269; SM 13/5/6). At Tyringham, the standing figures were within niches in the exterior wall, flanking each entrance, and atop the dome, a feature Soane included on the 1820 scheme for Holy Trinity (see SM 54/3/4-9). On this drawing, Soane has transferred all of the statuary to the roofline and base of the tower.

The sarcophagi do symbolically point to a function of Holy Trinity Church, Marylebone. It would be a church used for burials within its vaults (see SM 54/4/1, SM 54/4/29; SM 54/4/34-5). Nevertheless, this sculpture would need to be excluded because of the cost involved. Such adornment may be one of the reasons why the 1822 estimate was £28,600.

Level

Drawing

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).