[12/20] Plan of the mezzanine floor of the completed design of Queen Mary's Court, illustrating the accommodation and room distribution

Explore Collections

You are here: CollectionsOnline / [12/20] Plan of the mezzanine floor of the completed design of Queen Mary's Court, illustrating the accommodation and room distribution

Browse

English Baroque Drawings: architecture, sculpture and garden design
- Greenwich Royal Hospital
  - Revised final scheme under Thomas Ripley, 1729-58

Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image

Print this image in A4 view

Reference number

SM volume 109/24

Purpose

[12/20] Plan of the mezzanine floor of the completed design of Queen Mary's Court, illustrating the accommodation and room distribution

Aspect

Mezzanine floor plan

Scale

Just under 20 feet to 1 inch

Inscribed

In brown ink at top of sheet, Half Story of Queen Mary's Court. / Private men 248; and with numbered scale; and in C19 hand at top and bottom of right edge of sheet, 24.

Signed and dated

Undated but datable c.1735

Medium and dimensions

Pen and grey ink over graphite under-drawing, with grey wash; on laid paper, laid down, with 15 mm reinforcing strip on right edge (top edge of volume); 520 x 370

Hand

Unidentified hand in office of Thomas Ripley

Watermark

Countermark: IV

Notes

The accommodation layout is almost identical to that on the ground floor, or Principal Story, principal floor and demonstrates the efficiency of the revised plan for Queen Mary's Court (see [12/18]). The main east range can accommodate 136 men, and the south range (beyond the corner block), 112 men, making up the 248 total given in the title of the drawing. On the floor above, [12/22], a further 17 cubicles are shown in the narrow corridor-like space above the chapel altar, giving 265, as indicated on the title of that drawing.

The plan shows the bench and box pew accommodation in the galleries of the chapel. The front seats are in enclosed boxes; those behind are in three rows of benches. The steps up to the main chapel floor within the dome space are drawn in straight, presumably a guess at the intended final layout.

Literature

Axel Klausmeier, Thomas Ripley, Architekt: Fallstudie einer Karriere im Royal Office of the King's Works im Zeitalter des Neopalladianismus, Frankfurt am Main, 2000, pp. 113-24 Not in Wren Society

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).