Inscribed
No 33 Red Lion Square /October 24th 1822 / Sir / When I had the Honour to wait / upon you a short time ago it was / mentioned in conversation that I / possessed Plans of all my Apartments, / and which I had made upon being / appointed to the Office of Custos Brevium. / You consented to my sending [_] / copies and which I deliver with / this Letter - The original Plans were upon / a large scale, showing the dimensions / of every thing down to the dimensions of shelves; and which were useful / to me in connexion with an Index / that I made to every document in / my possession – the reduced and / abridged / To / J. Soane Esq[ui]r[e] / (verso)abridged copies which accompany / this Letter are not likely to be of / any use to you, for, beyond the being / a reference to the interior of / Apartments which are inaccessible / unless I go to Mrs [D_] open / them: altho’ they can scarce / be of any use to you, Sir; yet I / conceive they may [_] since they / shew the quantity of Room occupied / by the Cus[tos]: Brev[ium]: and thereby will / [_] when the time comes round for an [_] count of new Places / for the Records. / I am altogether unacquainted / with Planning and drawing and / what I now offer requires to be / received as only an attempt to / represent the Rooms which / belonged to me - / I have / I have the Honor to be / Sir your obed[ian]t servant [_] / G Humphreys / Dep[uty]: Cus[tos]: Brev[ium]: / C[ommon].P[leas]. / W[estminster]. Hall / 24 Oct: 1822 / relating to the Court / of Common Pleas / accompanied with / drawing from / Mr. Humphreys
Signed and dated
- 24/10/1822
October 24th 1822
Medium and dimensions
Pen, on laid paper (378 x 237)
Watermark
W Phipps
Level
Drawing
Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation.
This catalogue of Soane’s designs for the New Law Courts was generously funded by The Worshipful Company of Mercers and The Pilgrim Trust.
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).
