[2] Design for a room entablature with a bolection-moulded acanthus frieze and a dentilled cornice, c. 1689-91

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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
    - Four large-scale designs for room cornices and entablatures, contemporary with those in 6/1

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Reference number

SM, volume 110/60

Purpose

[2] Design for a room entablature with a bolection-moulded acanthus frieze and a dentilled cornice, c. 1689-91

Aspect

Elevation

Scale

About 6 inches to 1 foot

Inscribed

In ink by George Dance at bottom left (originally bottom right), Gd, and to left (i.e. below), (59)

Signed and dated

Undated, but probably near beginning of period 1689-94

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink over graphite under-drawing with grey wash; on laid paper, laid down, with light brown staining and pink-brown blotches over 130 mm of sheet on right; 320 x 464

Hand

Gibbons

Watermark

Strasbourg Lily / 4WR, (triple lobe for intermediate floret of crown; same as 110/58 and 62, and also 110/32

Notes

There is no room at Hampton Court with this pattern of this entablature, as all the friezes with leaf carving are have coved rather than bolection in profile. The only contemporary design for an interior which has an entablature to match this is the wall elevation at All Souls for an unidentified room, previously associated with the Queen's Closet at Hampton Court, but not dimensioned to fit that space (Geraghty 2007, no. 413; AS, I.93; see also Thurley, 2003, fig. 160). The pen drawing of the architectural frame, including the entablature, is in Hawksmoor's hand while the sculptural details are by Gibbons. The interior in question may have been at Kensington Palace (partially rebuilt and refitted, 1689-96), but here too there is no known room with the layout and dimensions corresponding to those on the All Souls drawing.

Literature

Wren Society, IV, pl. 43, 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

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.

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