[73-77] Further alternative designs for the Pitt Cenotaph, 9-12 April, 1818 (5)

Explore Collections

You are here: CollectionsOnline / [73-77] Further alternative designs for the Pitt Cenotaph, 9-12 April, 1818 (5)

Browse

Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Bank of England
  - London: National Debt Redemption Office, Old Jewry, City of London: designs, working drawings and drawings for exhibition, 1817-18, 1819, 1823 (100)

Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image

Print this image in A4 view

Reference number

SM (73) 48/1/4 (74) 48/1/7 (75) 48/1/8 (76) 48/1/9 (77) 48/1/10

Purpose

[73-77] Further alternative designs for the Pitt Cenotaph, 9-12 April, 1818 (5)

Aspect

73 Cross section 74 Longitudinal section 75 Cross section 76 Interior perspective of Cenotaph with hall in front 77 Drawings 73-74 copied to a reduced scale together with two plans. The left-hand plan relates to drawing 76, the right-hand plan is at first floor level and appears in the same form on drawing 68 (general plan of the first floor dated 17 March 1818)

Scale

(73) to a scale (74) bar scale of 3/7 inch to 1 foot (75) to a scale (76) to a scale (77) bar scale of ¼ inch to 1 foot

Signed and dated

(73) 9 April 1818 (74) L.I.F. 11 April 1818 (75-76) L.I.F. 12 April 1818

Medium and dimensions

(73) Pencil, sepia, raw sienna, blue and pink washes, shaded on wove paper (648 x 525) (74) pencil, sepia, raw sienna and pink washes, shaded on wove paper (530 x 734) (75) pencil, warm sepia, sepia and raw sienna washes, shaded on wove paper (630 x 487) (76) pencil, warm sepia ands light blue washes, shaded on wove paper (461 x 600) (77) pencil, warm sepia, light blue, burnt sienna and pink washes, shaded, partly pricked for transfer on wove paper (723 x 520)

Hand

(73-77) various Soane office hands no Day Book

Notes

Soane's first designs for the Cenotaph were made 17-20 December 1817 (drawings 43-46). Others followed at the end of January 1818 (drawings 59-61). The drawings 73-77 made in April differ from these earlier designs in several ways. Factors that must have affected their design stem from Soane's meeting with the Bank of England's Committee for Building on 29 January 1818. This was when the decision to acquire the whole site was taken and also the brief for the building expanded to include more offices and little if any domestic accommodation. The Bank's consent to place a statue of William Pitt in the building with 'the Committee for erecting the said statue [to] defray any additional expense that may be incurred' (summary of the Minutes of the Bank of England Building Committee in the Soane Archive) allowed Soane to a go ahead with his design for a Cenotaph. Soane's early floor plans place the statue centrally on an axis with the entrance (drawings 42, 51-54) except for drawings 49 and 50 which experiment with a diagonal axis, drawings 55, 56, 65 and 66 all locate the Cenotaph left of centre but still on an axis with the entrance. A plan of the first floor (drawing 68, dated 17 March 1818) shows the Cenotaph in a courtyard, not on an axis with the entrance, but with ample daylight. However, the design does not correspond with the plan published in Soane's Designs for Public and Private Buildings, 1832, plate XLVIII****).
In the drawings catalogued here (73-77) more consideration is given to lighting so that while the earliest designs relied solely on a lantern, the intermediate designs (59,60) also have a lantern but drawing 59 has first floor windows too. Three of the current designs have a dome with lunettes and the first floor has tall windows set between columns on four of the designs. All of the designs (save drawings 61) have an arcaded ground floor and columnar first floor.

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).