[169] Preliminary design, New Law Courts, 1823-25

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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)
      - Details design, 1823-25 (1)

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Reference number

SM 69/7/1/v/b

Purpose

[169] Preliminary design, New Law Courts, 1823-25

Aspect

Detail profile of mouldings, perhaps associated with the ceilings of the New Law Courts, possibly as executed

Scale

to a scale

Signed and dated

1822-25
dated in accordance with known building campaign

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, on wove paper (282 x 294, maximum dimensions)

Hand

Sir John Soane RA (1753 - 1837), architect

Notes

This detail drawing of mouldings is clearly in Soane's own hand, and demonstrates his control over the decorative elements of the New Law Courts' interiors. While it is difficult to locate such partial details, Summerson attempts to associate them with an apparently unrelated drawing (see note in drawing file). It is essentially two shallow curves, divided and crowned by projecting tori, terminated in a characteristically Soanian banderol. As such, it most likely represents part of a ceiling around the opening for a lantern light.

Literature

Sawyer, 1999: p 539, footnote 1591

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).