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  • image SM (80) 48/1/11 (81) P401

Reference number

SM (80) 48/1/11 (81) P401

Purpose

[80-81] Pitt Cenotaph: further alternative design together with drawing made for exhibition at the Royal Academy, 1819 (2)

Aspect

80 Section through the National Debt Redemption Office with design for the Cenotaph 81 Perspectival section of the Cenotaph exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1819

Scale

(80-81) to a scale

Signed and dated

  • (81) datable to 1819

Medium and dimensions

(80) Pen, burnt umber, raw umber, raw sienna, green, blue and Indian red washes, shaded, partly pricked for transfer with single ruled and black wash border on wove paper (460 x 587) (81) framed, not available (June 2013)

Hand

(80) Soane office (81) Henry Parke (1790-1835, pupil 1814-1820)

Notes

Drawing 80 is a section (from the front to the back of the building) through three storeys and a lantern, showing the Cenotaph sited in a courtyard. The courtyard setting would have helped to achieve good natural lighting as well as allowing some separation from the everyday bustle of finance and commerce. A first floor plan (drawing 68, q.v.) shows a courtyard with the Cenotaph circular (at this floor level) and with three rectangular apses.
Drawing 81 is a perspectival section that was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1819.
The dome with lantern is the same as in drawing 80 (though better drawn) and the other storeys seem to correspond though 80 is without the Greek key mouldings of the middle floor shown on 81.
Drawing 81 was exhibited at the Royal Academy under the title: 'A Cenotaph now building, to the memory of the late Right Hon. William Pitt, etc.'. 'Now building' (that is, in 1819) was true of the National Debt Redemption Office but not the case for the Pitt Cenotaph, which was opened in 1823.
For another drawing of the Pitt Cenotaph exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1823 see drawing 98.

Level

Drawing

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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.

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