[1] Design for a chimney-piece with a plain fire surround and an overmantel with a blank rectangular portrait frame surrounded by swags, drops of fruit and flowers, fronds and wreaths

Explore Collections

You are here: CollectionsOnline / [1] Design for a chimney-piece with a plain fire surround and an overmantel with a blank rectangular portrait frame surrounded by swags, drops of fruit and flowers, fronds and wreaths

Browse

English Baroque Drawings: architecture, sculpture and garden design
- Hampton Court Palace
  - Designs for chimney-pieces, room cornices and entablatures, door cases and internal wall elevations, c.1689-1694, mostly by Grinling Gibbons
    - Five 'early' presentation designs for chimney-pieces, mainly in grey wash

Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image

Print this image in A4 view

Reference number

SM, volume 110/32

Purpose

[1] Design for a chimney-piece with a plain fire surround and an overmantel with a blank rectangular portrait frame surrounded by swags, drops of fruit and flowers, fronds and wreaths

Aspect

Elevation, incomplete on right side

Scale

About 1 foot to 1 inch

Inscribed

In ink by George Dance, bottom right, Gd, and by C19 hand, (32)

Signed and dated

Undated, but probably near beginning of period c. 1689-94

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink with grey wash over graphite under drawing; on laid paper, laid down, top 55 mm with pinkish brown staining, blotching and erosion of paper in places; 464 x 291

Hand

Gibbons

Watermark

Strasbourg Lily/4WR, with three-lobed intermediate florets (same as 110/38); countermark: combined PVL (Piet van der Ley), as 110/35, 36, 37

Notes

The relief border around the portrait frame is arranged as drops and swags of fruit and flowers suspended from ribbons and intertwined at the side with a pair of fronds, and hanging at the centre from a garter star backed by a pair of trumpets and sprays of olive leaves and wheat ears. Above are winged cherubs' heads, surmounted by a crown in the zone of the cornice. The cornice is marked only by diagonal pencil lines at the angles.

The staining pattern at the top of the sheet corresponds closely with that on the next drawing from the volume in this group of five mainly grey-washed designs, 2 (110/35), suggesting that they were grouped together in the volume before its present ordering (see Introduction).

Literature

Esterly, Gibbons, 1998, p. 70; Tipping, Gibbons, 1914, fig. 82; Wren Society, IV, pl. 33, bottom; Esterly, Gibbons, 1998, fig. 41

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Grinling Gibbons and the Art of Carving, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 22 October 1998 - 24 February 1999

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).