[18] Presentation drawing for alternative designs No 4 and No 5 for the College on an enclosed quadrangular plan

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Public buildings
  - London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, Southwark for the Governors of Dulwich College, 1811-1813 (108)
    - Five alternative preliminary designs, April to May 1811 (16)

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Reference number

SM 65/4/15

Purpose

[18] Presentation drawing for alternative designs No 4 and No 5 for the College on an enclosed quadrangular plan

Aspect

Bird's eye view for Design N^o 4 / & / 5

Inscribed

as above, N^o X, (Soane) Dulwich College

Signed and dated

(Soane) Lincolns Inn Fields / May 1811

Medium and dimensions

Pen and coloured washes, watercolour technique, shaded, within an eight-ruled pen and sepia and black wash border on wove paper (322 x 467)

Hand

George Bailey (1792-1860, pupil and Soane office assistant 1806-1837, curator 1837-1860) (attribution by comparison of hands)

Notes

The fourth design is a development of the quadrangular plan of Design N^o 1. The Mausoleum is now rectangular on plan and connects the east end of the chapel and the south end of the Gallery. The Mausoleum is shown with columns arranged in a circle and with a rectangular chamber behind that presumably is for the tomb.

The fifth design though similar to design N^o 4 locates the Mausoleum on the west side of the Gallery, projecting out from the centre, a more prominent position.
The bird's eye view most resembles design N^o 5 having the Mausoleum placed to the west of the Gallery.

On Thursday 16 May 1811, Soane records in his office Note Book a visit to Mr Allen at Dulwich when he handed over the first five designs and 'settled gen[eral] est[imate] of Gallery and finish and Mausol[eum] ab[out]: £8000 on a rough calculation'.

Literature

C. Davies, 'Masters of building: the first independent purpose-built picture gallery: Dulwich Picture Gallery', Architect's Journal, April 1984, p. 53
F. Nevola, Soane's favourite subject: the story of Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2000, pp. 28 & 176

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.

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).