Scale
to a scale
Inscribed
View of the Hall of Entrance from Parliament Street / looking into the Court of Equity.
Signed and dated
- 07/09/1826
badly-nested tags: i
Medium and dimensions
Pencil, coloured washes including sepia and raw umber, within double ruled border on laid paper (284 x 455) mounted on buff sugar paper bound in volume (340 x 532)
Hand
Probably Joseph Michael Gandy ARA (1771 - 1843), draughtsman
Notes
This is one of two known views of the designated Hall of Entrance to the Court of King’s Bench (compare SM Vol 61/51). It was located on the ground floor of the corner pavilion tower on the northern range of The Stone Building; designed by Soane to complete its façade to St Margaret's Street. The view is taken from the fireplace in the south wall. The interior is marked by characteristic horizontal bands, recessed and incised in the wall plane. This continues around the segmental alcove, which is pierced by an architrave-framed doorway, topped by a segmental pediment supported by vertical consoles. Beyond this is a passageway and a corresponding doorway, leading on to an oblique view of the Court of Equity. The cornice is marked by a Greek key frieze and a projecting moulded cornice, above which is a segmental starfish ceiling. Further foliate and incised ornamentation is indicated on the rib panels, which meet to form an octagonal surround for a convex patera. The outmost door on the left-hand side is false, whilst the innermost leads to ancillary rooms and a staircase to the King’s Bench gallery.
Literature
Wedgwood 1992, fig. 19; illustrated on p. 39
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
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