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  • image SM 53/3/42
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Reference number

SM 53/3/42

Purpose

[392] Final design, New Law Courts, 30 April 1824

Aspect

Elevations of a Gothic façade for the Court of King's Bench to St Margaret's Street, with octagonal corner turret, and the junction with the northern flank of the Stone Building, not executed, with variant regular octagonal corner turret, almost as executed

Scale

bar scale of 1/10 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Elevation of part of the Front of the New Courts, next St. Margaret's Street / altered agreeably to the directions of the Select Committee .. 13th. April 1824. / 13th. Ap[ri]l. 1824 / As altered by the Select Committee. / 6th. May. 1824 / Scale of Feet

Signed and dated

  • 30/04/1824
    Lincolns Inn Fields / 30th. April. 1824

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, wash, part coloured washes including raw umber, burnt umber and sepia, within septupal ruled wash border pricked for transfer on wove paper (741 x 535)

Hand

Attributed to Charles James Richardson (1806 - 1871), draughtsman
The Day Book entry for 30 April 1824 notes that Charles Richardson was Copying drawings of the / New Courts to a reduced / scale.

Notes

A similar type of ruled border occurs on SM 53/3/37 and SM 53/3/38. As the inscription makes clear, this drawing was prepared in response to Soane's meetings with the Select Committee on 13 April and 6 May 1824. The original proposal is central to the sheet, showing the corner turret as an irregular octagon with fenestration at three levels of two of its outer faces. A revised propsal (to the right of the latter) shows the turret with a regular footprint, its dimensions reduced and with single lancets in its diagonal sides. This agrees with the elevation to New Palace Yard shown in SM 53/3/41, save for the absence of fleurons beneath the turret's battlements. The washes applied to the two elevations are clearly by different hands.

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).