St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, Old Street, Finsbury, Islington, London, 1777, 1781-2 and c.1794-1811

Explore Collections

You are here: CollectionsOnline / St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, Old Street, Finsbury, Islington, London, 1777, 1781-2 and c.1794-1811

Browse

Books

George Dance office drawings: the drawings of George Dance the Elder and George Dance the Younger
- Prison, courts and a lunatic hospital (5)
  - St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, Old Street, Finsbury, Islington, London, 1777, 1781-2 and c.1794-1811 Competition design (by an unidentified architect), preliminary design by James Peacock?, contract drawings, specification and drawings of building as executed (32)

Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image

Print this image in A4 view

Reference number

SM D4/1/1

Purpose

St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, Old Street, Finsbury, Islington, London, 1777, 1781-2 and c.1794-1811

Aspect

[3] Front elevation, not finished

Scale

1/14 in to 1 ft

Signed and dated

1777, 1781-2 c.1794-1811

Medium and dimensions

Pen, raw umber and sepia washes, pencil , shaded on laid paper (280 x 960)

Hand

Peacock?

Notes

The elevation shows - behind a buttressed screen wall, 15 foot high and railed in the centre - a three-storey, 49-bay building punctuated by a domed centre consisting of a three-bay bow flanked by single canted bays linked to three projecting bays of the wings, and end pavilions that have a three-bay front with a canted bay on each side; the inner one again linked to three projecting bays. The centre three bays of these three units have giant pilasters and the upper storeys have over-scaled festoons, while the intervening bays are plain with three rows of semicircular-headed windows, those of the first and second floors under shared repeating single arches.

The elevation is not drawn by Dance and there is a puzzle as to its author. Kalman considers that James Peacock - Dance's chief assistant from about 1767 to 1814 - is a likely candidate on the evidence of similarities with a contemporary design for the west side of Finsbury Square also attributed by Kalman to Peacock as well as, for example, the additive character of the decoration. The draughtsmanship of this elevation and the Finsbury Square elevation are similar.

At what stage the drawing (with [SM D4/1/2]) was made is not known. It may have been a competition entry that was not completed in time though as Dance's assistant, Peacock (if it is his design) would presumably have been ineligible; or, it might have been made after the competition and before the final design was settled.

REPRODUCED. P. du Prey, John Soane, the making of an architect 1982, fig.3.14.

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).