Scale
bar scale of 1 8/10 inches to 10 feet
Signed and dated
Medium and dimensions
Pen, wash, coloured washes of Payne’s grey, stone and yellow, on wove paper (811 x 565)
Hand
Possibly Gandy, Joseph Michael (1771--1843), draughtsman
Notes
Possibly the first highly washed perspective of the interior which can be compared with SM 13/5/6 produced in January 1801. The use of Doric may be indicative of other mausolea such as that at Castle Howard, and was considered a stronger, more solid order than the elaborate Ionic and Corinthian. Ionic is reserved for the tower. The female figures are sitting, some holding their veil, others perhaps with their heads bowed. These play the role of mourners, a motif seen in funerary monuments from antiquity, which along with the sarcophagi and urns immediately notify the viewer of the funereal function of the building. The ourobouros (a snake devouring its tail) was seen on ancient monuments, denoting the cycle of birth and renewal, and was utilised by Soane on memorial stones (SM 63/6/10-12dated to 1808), and later, most famously for the tomb he designed for his wife, Eliza in 1815, and which would later hold his oldest son, John Soane Junior in 1823, and Soane himself in 1837
Level
Drawing
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
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