[82-86] Designs for floors and ceilings for the Pitt Cenotaph, October, November and not dated, 1818 (5)

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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)

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Reference number

SM (82) 48/1/23 (83) 48/1/24 (84) 48/1/27 (85) 48/1/25 (86) 48/1/28

Purpose

[82-86] Designs for floors and ceilings for the Pitt Cenotaph, October, November and not dated, 1818 (5)

Aspect

82 Floor plan and plan of the ceiling of the hall to the Cenotaph 83 Floor plan and plan of ceiling to the Cenotaph with pencil amendments by Soane 84-85 Floor plan and plan of the ceiling to the Cenotaph 86 Floor plan of the Cenotaph

Scale

(82) bar scale of 1¼ inch to 1 foot (83) 3/4 inch to 1 foot (84) bar scale of ½ inch to 1 foot (85-86) bar scale of 3½ inches to 5 feet

Inscribed

83 a few illegible pencil inscriptions 86 (pencil) M^rCuthbert, M^r------ (illegible) and (pen) dimensions given

Signed and dated

(84) Oct. 27 1818 (85) November 2^nd1818

Medium and dimensions

(82) Pen and sepia washes on wove paper (542 x 594) (83) pen, sepia and light blue washes, pencil, pricked for transfer on wove paper (537 x 597) (84) pen and black wash with double ruled and black wash border on wove paper, top edge cut (756 x 617) (85) pen and sepia washes on wove paper (755 x 538) (86) pen and sepia washes, partly pricked for transfer on wove paper (749 x 541)

Hand

(82-86) Soane office no Day Book

Watermark

(82) Smith & Allnutt (84) J Whatman 1816 (85, 86) Smith & Allnutt 1817

Notes

Drawing 82 is for a shallow, vaulted, starfish ceiling with diamond and triangular-shaped panels outlined by ball mouldings. At the top of the drawing is a passageway with a panelled ceiling and between this and the starfish ceiling is the striated underside of an arch. Not dated, it is likely that this drawing is the executed design since it corresponds with plate XLVIII**** published in Soane's Designs for public and private buildings, 1832. The ceiling is 22 feet wide and 15 feet 1 inch deep and is for the hall behind the entrance to the National Debt Redemption Office in Old Jewry.
Drawing 83 is not dated but is quite close to the relevant part of drawing 66 (plan of ground floor) that has the date of 19 March 1818. What is seen is first, is a passageway that comes after the entrance and entrance hall, then the Cenotaph with its circular opening to the first floor and dome and, at the back, the space for Pitt's statue. Here, a rectangle of pale blue wash, repeated on each side of the central area, indicates skylights or lanterns, that is, some form of top-lighting.
Drawings 84 and 85, dated 27 October 1818 and 2 November 1818 respectively, are the same as drawing 46, dated 20 December 1817 (q.v.).
Drawing 86 is close to drawing 67, a plan of the ground floor that, though undated, is likely to be the executed design or close to it. Drawing 86 shows four of the five bays of the front elevation, the entrance is in the second bay from the left and precedes the hall, passageway and then the Pitt Cenotaph.

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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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