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  • image SM (19) 51/5/9 (20) (51/5/9)

Reference number

SM (19) 51/5/9 (20) (51/5/9)

Purpose

[19-20] Unexecuted design for the east elevation of the new committee rooms and library for the House of Commons, for new committee rooms for the House of Lords, and a house for Black Rod, July 1825 (2)

Aspect

19 Block plans and elevation 20 Elevation as drawing 19

Scale

(19, 20) 1/16 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

19 Design for New Committee Rooms for the House of Lords, and for Committee Rooms / and Library for the House of Commons, labelled: The House of the / Usher of the Black Rod, New Committee Rooms / for the House of Lords, East End of the / Painted Chamber, Committee Rooms Library &c / for the House of Commons, East End of the / House of Commons and vertical dimensions of 12'.0" / 16 0 / 10.6 given 20 Sketch of a Design for New Committee Rooms for the House of Lords and for New Committee Rooms / and Library &c for the House of Commons, labelled: The House of the Usher of / the Black Rod, New Committee Rooms for the / House of Lords, East End of the / Painted Chamber, New Committee Rooms / Library &c for the House of Commons, East End of the / House of Commons &c and vertical dimensions of 12'.0" / 16.0 / 10:6 given

Signed and dated

  • (19, 20) July 1825

Medium and dimensions

(19) Pen, raw umber, sepia and pink washes, shaded, pricked for transfer on wove paper (456 x 708) (20) pen, raw umber and sepia washes, shaded, pricked for transfer on wove paper (455 x 664)

Hand

Soane office

Notes

An earlier elevation of the east front of the House of Commons (see drawing 1: London: Westminster Palace: House of Commons ... designs for a new House of Commons) shows it as it was before James Wyatt's alterations of 1805-6 seen here.
The use of the same elevation for the Painted Chamber is difficult to explain. Images of its east end, drawn between 1788 and 1820 (published in H. Colvin's Views of the Old Palace of Westminster in Architectural History, IX, 1955, figs. 109-113) show a pair of tall arched, mullion windows. That is, both the earlier windows and the plate tracery version presumably introduced by Wyatt when he fitted up the Painted Chamber as conference rooms from 1799 (King's Works, VI, p. 515).

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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