Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  [350] Survey on completion, Court of King's Bench, 11 December 1829

Browse

  • image SM 81/1/22
Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image
Print this image in A4 view  (icon indicating printer link)

Reference number

SM 81/1/22

Purpose

[350] Survey on completion, Court of King's Bench, 11 December 1829

Aspect

Elevation of an Elizabethan fireplace with moulding sections, Lord Chief Justice's Robing Room, as extant

Scale

bar scale of 1/4 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Drawing of Queen Elizabeth's Chimney Piece / now Standing in the Robing room of the Lord Chief Justice / of the Court of King's Bench at Westminster

Signed and dated

  • 01/12/1829
    Dec[embe]r. 1st 1829 -

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, wash, pen, on wove paper (639 x 519)

Hand

Soane Office, draughtsman

Notes

The elevation records a chimneypiece with a moulded reveal comprising of fillet, ovolo, fillet, cyma recta; the latter indicated as being carved with a layered acanthus; consoles ornamented with demi-anthemia appear beneath the junction with the lintel. The latter is shown as rising to a shallow triangular hood, underneath which is a frieze carved with a grotesque rinceau with the crowned royal monogram 'ER', tied with a love knot. The idiom is characteristic of decorative carving at the opening of Elizabeth I's reign.

The chimneypiece originally stood in the Exchequer Chamber, referred to as 'Queen Elizabeth's Chamber' or in its corrupted form 'Queen Elizabeth's Bedchamber'. This was built from 1565 - 1567 as part of the expansion of the Exchequer's offices. Upon the Chamber's demolition it was incorporated into the Court of King's Bench Robing Room. With the demolition of the New Law Courts (1882 - 1883) it was moved into the Tapestry Room at Saint James's Palace.

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation. This catalogue of Soane’s designs for the New Law Courts was generously funded by The Worshipful Company of Mercers and The Pilgrim Trust.

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).