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  • image SM volume 69/55

Reference number

SM volume 69/55

Purpose

[7] Preliminary drawing by Joseph Michael Gandy of the circular temple

Aspect

Rough perspective

Medium and dimensions

Pencil on laid paper (234 x 370)

Hand

J.M. Gandy

Watermark

Buttanshaw 1794

Notes

Gandy's rough drawings for the temple are probably preliminary designs for a lecture drawing (SM 14/4/3), dated 12 February 1800 and showing the temple set within a vast landscape. The temple has paired Doric columns at three corners, the three canted walls between them having pedimented doorcases set within round-headed relieving arches. The hexagonal two-storey structure is surmounted by a dome raised on a drum-shaped base, with the lower stage ornamented by a sash motif and the dome capped by a strigilated finial.

In the lecture drawing, strigilated finial supports a figurative statue of a Roman soldier. The drawing shows the temple in a garden setting, with a river in the distance backed by a range of mountains.

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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.

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