Presentation drawing of entrance gate

Explore Collections

You are here: CollectionsOnline / Presentation drawing of entrance gate

Browse

Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Country houses, etc.
  - Wokefield Park, West Berkshire: a gate for Mrs Brocas, 1789

Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image

Print this image in A4 view

Reference number

SM volume 68/5

Purpose

Presentation drawing of entrance gate

Aspect

Elevation and plan

Scale

bar scale of 3/8 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Gates &c five feet high / Space between each rail 3 1/8, M^rs Brocas, Wokefield, This side supposes one pannel of / the present paling to be altered, Paling already done, 3:3, 11 feet, 3:1½ (twice), 2:0, 9" (twice), (feint pencil) 4:9 high / side paling ---- / rustic---- (illegible), 2 1/4 & 3" thick, 2 1/4 & 3" th[ick], 3 1/4 thick, 3/4 fine - thick, and dimensions in pencil

Signed and dated

Welbeck Street Sep^r18: 1789

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen and grey and sepia washes, within single-ruled border on laid paper (471 x 291)

Hand

Soane

Watermark

fleur-de-lis over cartouche with ornate W below

Notes

The gate is at the entrance of a wooden fence. The gate has two posts, each two feet wide and with a decorative plaques depicting a lion. A sculptural bust surmounts both posts. Soane's pencil notes on the drawing refer to the dimensions and thickness of the simple iron gate.

Soane nine journeys to Wokefield in 1788 and charged £650 to the client. He made alterations to the house and built a gate, a design for which is shown on this drawing. The house was altered in the 19th century.

Soane built the Brocas chapel at Bramley church in 1801.

Historian Rupert Willoughby found a reference, Bramley in the Old Days, which suggests the gate was transported to the Brocas family seat at Beaurepaire Park c.1839, upon the sale of Wokefield Park. 'An old Bramley farmer called William Clift, who was born in 1828, recalls the events in his memoirs. According to Clift, the "large iron gates at the entrance over the moat" were brought from Wokefield Park, on the Brocas estate at Stratfield Mortimer, which had been the family's favoured residence in the 18th century. Clift's father provided the timber for the bridge.' The iron gates are not the same as Soane's design and were probably not built by him, but the brick posts are probably the same as those designed by Soane.

Literature

P. Dean, Sir John Soane and the country estate, 1999, p.181; R. Willoughby, Sherborne St John and the Vyne in the Time of Jane Austen, 2002, pp. 28-37.

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).