[106] Progress drawing

Explore Collections

You are here: CollectionsOnline / [106] Progress drawing

Browse

Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Public buildings
  - London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, Southwark for the Governors of Dulwich College, 1811-1813 (108)
    - Site progress drawings, May to September 1812 (23)

Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image

Print this image in A4 view

Reference number

SM 65/4/47

Purpose

[106] Progress drawing

Aspect

Perspective of west front under construction

Signed and dated

datable to mid 1812

Medium and dimensions

Pencil and coloured washes, watercolour technique, shaded, partly pricked for transfer on wove paper (372 x 582)

Hand

Soane office

Notes

This perspective is perhaps a copy of a progress view, in preparation for the Royal Academy lecture drawing, as it is not drawn in the record book like the other drawings, but on a larger loose sheet of wove paper.

An enlarged version of the view was drawn by a pupil as an illustration for Soane's twelfth Royal Academy lecture from the second series about construction on 12 March 1815 (SM 15/2/11). The drawing is of an almost identical view of the west front under construction but it is drawn in greater detail and shows the addition of the amber glass and false doors of the Mausoleum. There is also more of a building site drawn in the foreground and trees in the background, with workmen added to give an impression of the scale of the new Gallery.

Literature

F. Nevola, Soane's favourite subject: the story of Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2000, pp. 115 & 194

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).