[2] Design for a chimney-piece, with a bust of Charles I over the fire surround, and a tall overmantel portrait frame with a cresting of a cross of St George in a garter, with putti, palm fronds, and a long drop of flowers

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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 110/25

Purpose

[2] Design for a chimney-piece, with a bust of Charles I over the fire surround, and a tall overmantel portrait frame with a cresting of a cross of St George in a garter, with putti, palm fronds, and a long drop of flowers

Aspect

Elevation, partly unfinished on right

Scale

Not indicated, but about ^7/₈ in to 1 foot

Inscribed

In ink and pencil by a C19 hand, top right, 25

Signed and dated

Undated, but within range 1689-94

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink over graphite under-drawing, with pink, yellow ochre, yellow-green and grey washes, and with additions in graphite, including later re-drawing of baseline of design; on laid paper, with pinkish-brown staining in top 35 mm of sheet and 8 mm repair strip in wove paper at bottom (probably 1850); 422 x 200

Hand

Gibbons

Watermark

Shield with four lines in diagonal band (not all parallel), surmounted by fleur-de-lys (Strasbourg bend), over AJ

Notes

The cast shadows to the left of the vase, bust and fire surround indicate that the surround itself would have stood well forward of the chimney breast to provide sufficient depth for the display of the bust of Charles I. The design may record the bust that Bernini carved of Charles I from a triple portait by Van Dyck in 1636-37. The bust, which was delivered in April 1637 and universally admired was destroyed in the fire at Whitehall Palace in January 1698.

Gibbons’s sketch of the bust is consistent with several the details of Van Dyck’s triple portrait. This depicts Charles with a similar laced collar and buttoned vest, and with an oval garter medallion suspended from a garter ribbon. However, there exists at Arundel House another bust of Charles I based on Van Dyck’s triple portrait carved by the French sculptor Francois Dieussart in 1636, and Gibbons’s sketch may equally be a version of this example. The special prominence of the bust in the design is underscored by the octagonal framed backing panel (perhaps for a mirror).

The sketched portrait of Charles I in the large oval frame in the overmantel precedes the present drawing (the graphite is concealed by the yellow-green wash), and may have been abandoned when Gibbons decided to design the chimney-piece around an existing carved bust.

Literature

Wren Society, IV, pl. 27, bottom

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

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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.

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