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Purpose
Notes
There are no known surviving designs or working drawings relating to this Court. Never prominent within the wider plan of the site, it was recorded in Joseph Gandy’s survey of interior views, undertaken from August - September 1826. From the small rectangular plan, Soane echoed the solution of engaged piers projecting from the walls which he fist employed in the Lord Chancellor’s Robing Room. The inclusion of glazed skylights along its perimeter undoubtedly enhanced the effect, and maximised natural light for a space completely enclosed within the plan. As recorded, the interior has a marked emphasis on right-angled planes, and eschews the curved profiles and surfaces of the larger Courts. The ceiling, ornamented with rosettes in square panels around a lantern light, has recognisable affinities to that of the adjacent Courts of King’s Bench and Common Pleas.
Level
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).