[13] Design for a chimney-piece with a reclining cherub on the mantel shelf, beneath a drapery canopy suspended from ribbons entwined with a recorder, sheet music and flowers, and the fire surround with two billing doves in the frieze panel

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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
    - Thirteen designs for tall and richly sculpted chimney-pieces, in a variety of wash colours; probably for principal state rooms

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Reference number

SM, volume 110/52

Purpose

[13] Design for a chimney-piece with a reclining cherub on the mantel shelf, beneath a drapery canopy suspended from ribbons entwined with a recorder, sheet music and flowers, and the fire surround with two billing doves in the frieze panel

Aspect

Elevation, unfinished on right

Scale

Not indicated, but about ¾ inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

In ink by George Dance at bottom right, Gd, and to right in C19 hand, 51

Signed and dated

Undated, but datable 1689-94

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink over graphite under-drawing, with yellow ochre, green-yellow, pink, blue and grey washes; later black ink redrawing of baseline of design; on laid paper, laid down, with 7 mm repair strip added at bottom of sheet (probably 1850); 388 x 230

Hand

Gibbons

Watermark

Countermark: CT in ornate scrolled letters

Notes

One of Gibbons's most elegant compositions. The fire surround would have been in carved stone or marble and the cherub probably in limewood; the glass or porcelain vases would have been real examples and the drapery would probably have been trompe l'oeil carving, again in limewood. The baroque recorder in the trophy is accurately drawn, with the correct number of fingerholes and the bottom one properly displaced.

Literature

Wren Society, IV, pl. 40

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Grinling Gibbons and the Art of Carving, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 22 October 1998 - 24 February 1999
The Genius of Grinling Gibbons: from Journeyman to Kings Carver, Fairfax House, York, 14 April - 14 September 2018

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).