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  • image Image 1 for SM 53/3/37
  • image Image 2 for SM 53/3/37
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  • image Image 1 for SM 53/3/37
  • image Image 2 for SM 53/3/37

Reference number

SM 53/3/37

Purpose

[423] Finished drawing, alternative penultimate design, Westminster Hall and New Law Courts, 13 May 1824

Aspect

Elevation of Westminster Hall (in line), a Gothic façade to the Court of King's Bench, with octagonal corner turret (in coloured washes), with flyer showing variant for ground-floor windows, almost as executed

Scale

bar scale of 1/10 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Elevation of the Front of the New Law Courts next New Palace Yard, altered / agreeably to the directions of the Select Committee. / Scale of Feet / This alteration of the lower / windows made agreeable to / a Memorandum made by / the Chairman of the Select / Committee. 24th May. 1824 / (red pen) In. No: 3076 / (pencil) Lower windows to be square at the heads

Signed and dated

  • 13/05/1824
    John Soane Arch[itect]. / Lincolns Inn Fields / 13th. May 1824
    The date is probably that of Soane's meeting with the Select Committee, for which this drawing was prepared.

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, wash, coloured washes including raw umber, burnt umber and sepia, within septupal ruled wash border pricked for transfer on wove paper (645 x 488); flyer (50 x 82)

Hand

Probably George Bailey (1792 - 1860), draughtsman

Watermark

Weatherley & Lane (flyer)

Notes

The meticulous penmanship and variagated layering of coloured washes are characteristic of Bailey's draughtsmanship. The same type of rueld border occurs on SM 53/3/38. The verso bears the stamp of the Office of Works.

As the inscription makes clear, this drawing was prepared in responce to Soane's meeting with the Select Committee on 6 May 1824. The Day Book entry for 13 May records that George Bailey was preparing documentation for the New Law Courts, but not on drawings per se. As Soane saw the Select Committee on the afternoon of 13 May 1824, this drawing must have been prepared between the latter date and 6 May. The flyer, amending the heads of the turret's windows from pointed to square, was added in response to the Select Committee's meeting of 24 May 1824.

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.

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).