Preliminary alternative designs for the Gallery (2)

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The drawings from the office of Sir John Soane
- Public buildings
  - London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, Southwark for the Governors of Dulwich College, 1811-1813 (108)
    - Five alternative preliminary designs, April to May 1811 (16)

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Reference number

SM (6) 65/4/29 (7) 65/4/28

Purpose

Preliminary alternative designs for the Gallery (2)

Aspect

6 Front and rear elevations 7 Front elevation for the new Gallery, a more developed design based on drawing 6

Scale

(6) bar scale of 1/8 inch to 1 foot (7) bar scale of 1/9 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

7 Dulwich College

Signed and dated

(6) datable to before 4 April 1811 (7) April 4^th 1811

Medium and dimensions

(6) Pencil and sepia wash, partly pricked for transfer on wove paper (314 x 540) (7) pen, pencil and sepia wash on wove paper (312 x 539)

Hand

(6) Soane office (7) George Allen Underwood (1793-1829, pupil 1807-1815) (Day Book entry for 4 April 1811)

Notes

Drawing 6 is the first proposal for the new Gallery. In his will, Bourgeois had asked for the refurbishment of the existing gallery on the top floor of the west wing of the College. However Soane actually designed a whole new wing. The building has an eleven-bay front with projecting end bays. The elevations show, in altered forms, an attic storey crowning the central bay with a lunette window, and projecting end bays and entrance porch. There is a Classical treatment to the building with the use of pediments, panelled pilasters, balustrade and antefix but a seventeenth-century character is suggested by the use of tall cross windows with a mullion and a transom.

Drawing 7 is the earliest securely dated drawing for the Gallery, Nevola wrote that the 'simple block-like character of the porch and attic recalls the Neoclassicism of ... Ledoux'. A finished version of this elevation is in the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A 3306.176). See drawing 16 for a closely related elevation dated 29 April 1811.

Literature

F. Nevola, Soane's favourite subject: the story of Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2000, pp. 17 & 172

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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).