[161] Presentation drawing, New Law Courts, after 15 March 1823

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Office of Works
  - London: Palace of Westminster: The New Law Courts, surveys and designs, 1820-32 (507)
    - New Law Courts - Second Scheme, 1821-29 (345)
      - Designs for the Whole Site, 1821-29 (15)

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Reference number

SM 53/8/8

Purpose

[161] Presentation drawing, New Law Courts, after 15 March 1823

Aspect

Exterior perspective of the New Law Courts from the north west looking south east, unexecuted

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

View of the North & West Fronts of the New Law Courts at Westminster. Design No. 3 -

Signed and dated

1823
1823

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, coloured washes of raw sienna, Payne's grey and sepia, pen, within partial triple ruled wash and sepia border on wove paper (583 x 378)

Hand

Soane Office, draughtsman

Notes

This is a variant of the proposal in drawing SM 53/8/7, taken from the same position. It incorporates the rounded corners to the Court of King's Bench proposed by Sir Charles Long, as an expedient to maintain sight lines of the north façade of Westminster Hall. The drawing is evidently by the same hand as drawing SM 53/3/7, though the palette is slightly cooler. The left-hand edge of this drawing has been painted as an illusionistic curved sheet.

Literature

Wedgwood, 1992: p. 35, fig. 8; illustrated on p. 35
Sawyer, 1999: p. 566, footnote 1667

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).