Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  [1] Preliminary design for a bridge link, with Portalls, to connect Queen Mary's Closet with the Privy Garden and Water Gallery, dated September 1694
  • image SM, volume 110/19
Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image
Print this image in A4 view  (icon indicating printer link)

Reference number

SM, volume 110/19

Purpose

[1] Preliminary design for a bridge link, with Portalls, to connect Queen Mary's Closet with the Privy Garden and Water Gallery, dated September 1694

Aspect

Elevation with plan

Scale

4 feet to 1 inch

Inscribed

In ink by Hawksmoor as title at top of sheet, The Bridg and Portalls by the Queens / Clossett at Hampton Court Sept. 1694; and by Dance at top right, Gd, and to right in C19 hand, (19)

Signed and dated

  • September 1694

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink over graphite under-drawing, with graphite for plan; on laid paper, laid down; 285 x 449

Hand

Hawksmoor

Watermark

Strasbourg Bend; see Heawood, 145

Notes

The pencilled sketch plan above the elevation overlaps the left-hand end wall and is the probably an initial idea for the plan of the bridge-link structure. The proposal consists of an upwards extension of the 9-feet-high Privy Garden wall to carry a narrow walkway linked to the balcony of the Queen's Closet. The steps on the west side of the wall are in two flights of eight, finishing on the embankment walkway rather than the terrace level at ground level, 13 feet 9 inches below. The bridge link would have provided a new entrance to the Privy Garden from the Park, in the form of a segmental-arched opening flanked by fluted Doric three-quarter columns. The door on the left would have been blank and was included to balance the door beneath the Queen's Closet.

The sketch design is characteristic of Hawksmoor's mature drawing technique in the mid-1690s, especially in the use of wash on pencil outlines.

Literature

Wren Society, IV, pl. 21, top

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).