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Reference number

SM D4/9/6

Purpose

Church of St Bartholomew-the-less, West Smithfield, City of London, 1789

Aspect

[6] Cross-section through new E End including roof truss with a raised tie-beam and thumbnail perspective of clerestory lunette from NW

Scale

1/6 in to 1 ft

Inscribed

Section

Signed and dated

  • 1789

Medium and dimensions

Pen, sepia, burnt sienna, yellow, pink and lavender washes, pencil within single ruled border on laid paper (505 x 335)

Hand

Dance

Watermark

James (cut)

Notes

Dance's 1789 survey showed a church with an irregular plan consisting of a chancel and nave with a three-bay south aisle, two-bay north aisle - in which the patients of St Barholomew's Hospital sat - and a south-west tower. Dance proposed demolishing the chancel, removing the two piers between the nave and south aisle, enclosing the north aisle (which had been a chapel) to make a vestry, adding a gallery for the Hospital's patients at the west end over a new vestibule and, within the existing north and south walls, constructing a new nave (40 by 40 feet) on an octagonal plan with an altar recess framed by a multi-foiled arch and four corners, the two to the east with octagonal pulpits for the preacher and readers. The unexecuted seven-foiled arch may be related to Dance's new interest in Indian architecture. (For Dance's use of Indian architectural elements see the note on the Guildhall, London). The roof truss was designed with a raised tie-beam because of the vaulted ceiling and clerestory windows.

An engraved sectional view towards the east end recording the built interior, in the Archives of St Bartholomew's Hospital (X6/15), shows that the multi-foiled altar arc was not executed.

Level

Drawing

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).