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  • image SM 53/1/22

Reference number

SM 53/1/22

Purpose

[158] Presentation drawing, New Law Courts, before 5 March 1823

Aspect

Plan of the main (ground) floor of the New Law Courts, retaining only part of the existing walls of the Court of Common Pleas, with buildings to be replaced indicated in unwashed line, and minor revisions and varaitions (in pencil), not as executed

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

Design for the New Law Courts at Westminster - / Exhi[bited] to the Lo[r]d / Chief Baron / 5 March 1823 & / approved with the / alterations shown / in the larger plan / AB / x [_] / (pencil) No 3 / 5 Risers /Gallery / door dimensions given

Signed and dated

  • before 05/03/2018
    5 March 1823

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, wash, coloured washes of buff, pink and blue, pen, pricked for transfer on wove paper (879 x 592)

Hand

Sir John Soane RA (1753 - 1837), architect
Soane Office, draughtsman

Watermark

J Whatman / 1821

Notes

The drawing is annotated in Soane's hand, recording its presentation to the Lord Chief Baron on 5 March 1823, following which meeting it appears minor revisions were suggested. The colouring with washes in this drawing is divergent from others in this sequence, for here a buff wash indicates the circulation space through the central block of The Stone Building, as far as Westminster Hall, rather than Court rooms proper. A corresponding exterior perspective is shown in SM 53/8/6.

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).