[30] Presentation drawing (relating to the final design) for the monument set in an imaginary landscape, 1816

Explore Collections

You are here: CollectionsOnline / [30] Presentation drawing (relating to the final design) for the monument set in an imaginary landscape, 1816

Browse

Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Monuments and mausolea
  - London: St Giles in the Fields burial ground (now St Pancras Gardens), Camden: Soane monument [the 'Soane Tomb'], 1816, 1828 (47)

Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image

Print this image in A4 view

Reference number

SM 14/4/10

Purpose

[30] Presentation drawing (relating to the final design) for the monument set in an imaginary landscape, 1816

Aspect

Bird's eye view from the south-east showing the design as executed and without a gateway. Set in a hilly and wooded countryside with, in the distance, a village with its church, perched picturesquely on a hill

Signed and dated

(verso, pencil) drawn by G. Basevi / June 4 1816 (by a later curator's hand transcribing a very feint pencil inscription below) From, M^r G Basevi / 4 June 1816. The entry for 4 June 1816 in the office Day Book has nothing relating to Basevi drawing a monument, in fact he was drawing views of Thomas Swinnerton's new house.

Medium and dimensions

Pen, green, raw umber, warm sepia, sepia, blue and red washes within black wash border on wove paper (720 x 1092)

Hand

George Basevi (1794-1845, pupil 1810-16)

Watermark

James Whatman Turkey Mill Kent 1809

Notes

In all, Basevi was making drawings for the monument from 14 February to 23 May. The finished perspectives catalogued here would have been made between 4 March and 5 April when many references under Basevi's name appear in the Day Book to 'Birds eye views of Monument' including (26 March) 'Finished birds eye of Mr Soane's Monument' and 5 April 'About drawing of Monument, sent afterwards to the Exhibition'.

This drawing is is rather bland. Basevi must have benefited from observing Gandy at work and his perspectives show an increasing confidence.

The gateway does not appear in this last design drawing. It's massy weightiness might be said to represent earthly sorrow and contrasts with the lighter, more transcendent design of the four-sided aedicule, the contrast between the two mediated by the stark monolithic dome on piers. Essentially, the scale was wrong, the design placing the emphasis on the vault rather than the monument and, it was unnecessary. Whatever the reason, Soane was reluctant to give up the gateway but eventually did so.

Level

Drawing

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).