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  • image SM 20/5/2
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Reference number

SM 20/5/2

Purpose

[5] Finished measured drawing, probably after Thomas Hardwick, later used as a Royal Academy lecture drawings

Aspect

Elevation corresponding with SM 45/3/51

Scale

1/22 in to 1ft

Inscribed

as above

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, warm sepia, blue, green, and raw umber washes, shaded within triple ruled and wash border on laid paper (397 x 913)

Hand

attributed to Thomas Hardwick (1752- 1829) see below for note

Watermark

footed P (Heawood 3020, 3021)

Notes

The drawing, finished and filed with Soane's Royal Academy lecture drawings, corresponds with the unfinished elevation of SM 45/3/51. It is shaded in careful sepia tones that convey the circular geometry of the building. It is set in a landscape with sky, clouds, hills and foreground that reinforce the notion of an ideal reconstruction with the amphitheatre placed on a rural site empty of other buildings. Professor du Prey (January/February 2009) suggested that the handling of the landscape elements is beyond Soane's talent and recalls some of Hardwick's studies of Hadrian's Villa. This seems right and hence the re-attribution to Hardwick of a drawing that had seemed to be 'lost'. The drawing was used for Soane's R.A. lectures - Lecture III, drawings 31 and 44 (that is, used twice). Possibly Soane 'borrowed' it from Hardwick for use at the Royal Academy.

Soane's sketchbook 'Italian Sketches' 1779 (SM volume 39, 6-8r,9r) has a few details of the Colosseum, but he probably acquired most of his information from Hardwick who made the Colosseum a particular subject of study, commissioning a model and communicating a paper to the Society of Antiquaries. P.du Prey, (J.Lever, editor), Catalogue of the the Drawings Collections of the Royal Institute of British Architects, G-K, 1973, p.921 mentions 'two elevations and an ideal sectional reconstruction in John Soane's collection [that] may record the appearance of [lost] Hardwick originals copied ... in the summer of 1778'. Hardwick's drawings at the RIBA Drawings Collection are a plan 'from actual admeasurements / In 1778', and an elevation of one bay inscribed 'Elevation of part of the / Colosseum - 1778 - T.Hardwick', and 'the Model to be made 1/11 [the 11 blotted] of an Inch to a Foot' (SB57/6-7).

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).