[43] First design by Soane for a Cenotaph to commemorate William Pitt the Younger, 18 December 1817

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Bank of England
  - London: National Debt Redemption Office, Old Jewry, City of London: designs, working drawings and drawings for exhibition, 1817-18, 1819, 1823 (100)

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Reference number

SM 48/1/5

Purpose

[43] First design by Soane for a Cenotaph to commemorate William Pitt the Younger, 18 December 1817

Aspect

Section through three floors with an Ionic order

Scale

to a scale

Signed and dated

17 / & / 18 Dec^r1817

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, sepia and pink washes, shaded, pricked for transfer on wove paper (675 x 487)

Hand

Soane dated this drawing, the Day Book entry gives Henry Parke (1790-1835, pupil 1814-1820) as making 'perspective sections'

Notes

William Pitt the Younger (1759-1816), Tory politician and Prime Minister at the age of 24, was important to Soane who had altered and added to Pitt's Holwood House in Kent from 1786 and who owed him a great deal in terms of patronage not least Soane's position as architect to the Bank of England. The inspiration for a National Debt Redemption Office came from Pitt who, on his death at 43, had been buried in Westmnster Abbey. Soane conceived the idea of a Cenotaph or 'sepulchral monument erected in honour of a person whose body is elsewhere' (OED) within the Redemption Office.

This design, in Soane's hand and dated by him, is the first expression of that idea. The form it took was of a tribune which is to say, a space penetrating the ground and upper floors of a building usually articulated by arcades or columns and often top-lit. A form used by Soane as early as 1774 for a student design for a 'Nobleman's house' (q.v.) and, for example, at Tyringham (q.v.) and Pitzhanger (q.v.), the tribune is used here both for affect and specifically to light the proposed statue.

The sectional drawing shown here is a variant design and uses a Corinthian Order and an Ionic screen at ground floor level.

The introduction of a domed two-storey tribune would have disrupted the layout of the upstairs domestic apartments.

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).