Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  [1] First design for a pavilion on the Bowling Green
  • image SM, volume 110/28

Reference number

SM, volume 110/28

Purpose

[1] First design for a pavilion on the Bowling Green

Aspect

West elevation and plan

Scale

10 feet to just under 1 inch

Inscribed

In graphite, probably by Dickinson, with dimensions on the plan: 40 - 0 across the hall, 20 across depth of flank room on left, and 12 across central room behind staircase; and in ink by Dance at top right, Gd; and to right in C19 hand, (28)

Signed and dated

  • Undated, but datable 1700

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink over graphite under-drawing with grey and pink washes, and with sketched additions in graphite; on laid paper, laid down, the whole sheet lightly discoloured in pinkish brown with some brown stain marks; 356 x 238

Hand

William Dickinson

Watermark

Strasbourg Lily / 4WR; same as 110/29

Notes

This initial design is in the same hand as 110/27 and 29. The convention of the scale bar is like that on Dickinson's drawing for the Hampton Court Chapel reredos (8/1; 111/66) and his plan at All Souls showing extensions to Kensington Palace, c.1703 (Geraghty 2007, 248; AS, I. 86). In a later stage in the design, at 2 (110/29, site plan) and 3 (110/27, elevation), the portico has steps, and the depth of the plan is increased by 4 feet from the 36-feet scaled dimension on this plan, to the 40-feet dimension marked in graphite across the central hall of this drawing.On the elevation, Dickinson has sketched, in graphite, an extension to the roof-top balcony on the right side of the roof. This would have created more head-room for the upper flight of stairs up to the balcony. On the left side of the plan this upper stage is marked as a spiral stair in the area of the pendentive of the oval ceiling. In this position, the final ascent to the roof would have be cramped and ill lit. The revision in the next design, 110/27, provided large half pediments either side of the central viewing platform. These created more head-room close to the platform and space for small oval attic windows, one of which would have lit the upper flight of the stairs.In the final scheme for the Bowling Green site, drawn by Hawksmoor, four small lodges with domical roofs replace the single pavilion with a roof-top platform (the domical roofs were changed to pyramidal in the executed pavilions; see Thurley 2003, fig. 181).

The sketching in graphite includes an initial attempt at indicating the perspective view of the tree-lined alley through the open loggia, and, below the plan, a profile of the main entablature.

Literature

See 110/29 Wren Society, IV, pl. 25, top; Thurley 2003, fig. 178

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).