Working drawing for a chimney-piece, October 1788

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Country houses, etc.
  - Gawdy Hall, Suffolk: working drawing for a chimney-piece for the Revd Mr Holmes, 1788

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Reference number

SM 81/1/76

Purpose

Working drawing for a chimney-piece, October 1788

Aspect

Elevation, three sections and detail of Chimney Piece to Drawing Room

Scale

bar scale of approximately 1¼ inch to 1 foot and full size

Inscribed

as above, Entablature to / Chimney Piece, Section of Cornice shewing the manner / of fixing the Composition, Wall line, Line of Pannel, Line of Marble (twice), Line of frieze, Composition (eight times), Marble (three times), 3'6", 3'4", 5" (three times); (verso) Gawdy Hall / Chimney Piece / to Drawing Room

Signed and dated

Welbeck Street, Oct 10^th 88

Medium and dimensions

Pen and grey and pink washes, shaded, partly pricked for transfer, on cartridge paper with three fold marks (595 x 495)

Hand

badly-nested tags: br

Notes

The chimney-piece has panel pilaster jambs and an opening 3 feet 6 inches wide and 3 feet 4 inches high. The pilasters are ornamented with a bell-flower and ribbon motif, vertical waterleaves are repeated across the frieze and the dentils on the cornice are interspersed by pine cones. A roughly drawn guilloche ornament to the lining shows small flowers in each centre. All these mouldings are labelled 'Compositon' inferring that they could be purchased ready-made, and Soane 'paid Lane for Composⁿ Ornaments' relating to Gawdy Hall on 9 April 1789 (SM Journal 1, p. 84).

See also drawing 4 (SM 73/3/20) for Norwich, Norfolk: Norwich Castle Gaol. The verso of which has a plan, laid-out wall elevations and details for a Drawing Room and on the bottom left-hand side of the cut-down drawing is inscribed Holmes. Although with less detail than is shown here the chimney-piece appears to be the same.

Gawdy Hall, for which Soane carried out extensive alterations, was demolished in 1939 and the site is now 'a housing estate between Harleston and Bungay' (Dean, op.cit)

Joanna Tinworth, May 2012

Literature

P. Dean, Sir John Soane and the country estate, 1999, p.179; R. Klausner, The history of Gawdy Hall & its occupants, Redenhall, Norfolk, 2007

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).