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Reference number

SM D4/4/16

Purpose

Newgate Gaol, Newgate Street, City of London, 1768-c.1813

Aspect

[24] Bird's-eye perspective from W

Scale

to a scale

Signed and dated

  • 1768-c.1813

Medium and dimensions

Pen, sepia, green earth, raw umber and blue washes, shaded, within single ruled border on laid paper (360 x 745)

Hand

office

Notes

Carefully drawn using a watercolour technique for the masonry and sky, this aerial perspective shows the building as it was finally executed with, for example, the Keeper's House fronted by a single rather than the earlier double stair. Statues were seen within the four aedicules of the west front; photographs (National Monuments Record) of Newgate Gaol before 1902 show the aedicules on the southeast and east sides as empty but there are four statues on the southwest and west fronts. It seems that these were the figures of Plenty, Liberty, Severity (Justice) and Peace carved by Caius Gabriel Cibber (1630-1700) for the west side of the gatehouse of the old Newgate Gaol for which he received a payment of £100 on 27 May 1676 (Guildhall Library, Manuscripts Department, MS 184/4). The four statues were advertised for sale by Crowther of Syon Lodge in January 1995 (Apollo, CXL).

REPRODUCED. J Summerson, 'Newgate Gaol: catalogue of drawings in Sir John Soane's Museum'. Architectural History, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, II, 1959, p.46; Stroud fig.29c; Soane: connoisseur & collector, catalogue of an exhibition at the Soane Museum, 1995, cat.29.

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).