[421] Revised design, Westminster Hall and New Law Courts, 6 May 1824

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Office of Works
  - London: Palace of Westminster: The New Law Courts, surveys and designs, 1820-32 (507)
    - New Law Courts - Second Scheme, 1821-29 (345)
      - Northern Range - Court of King's Bench, 1823-29 (207)
        Select Committee Revisions, 1824-29 (79)
        Alternative Number Five: Octagonal Corner Turret, May 1824-April 1829 (27)
        Design and working drawings, May 1824-26 (21)

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Reference number

SM 53/3/41

Purpose

[421] Revised design, Westminster Hall and New Law Courts, 6 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), almost as executed

Scale

bar scale of ¹/₁₀ inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Elevation of the Front of the new Courts next New Palace Yard / altered agreeably to the directions of the Select Committee. / 5^th. May. 1824 / altered 6^t^h. May / Scale of Feet dimensions given

Signed and dated

06/05/1824
Lincolns Inn Fields / 6^th. May 1824

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 (743 x 533)

Hand

Probably George Bailey (1792 - 1860), draughtsman
The Day Book entry for 6 April 1824 ntoes that George Bailey was about Drawings and Estimates of the New Courts, copying papers realting thereto &c.

Notes

The meticulous penmanship and variagated layering of coloured washes are characteristic of Bailey's draughtsmanship. A similar type of ruled border occurs in SM 53/3/37 and SM 53/3/38. As the inscription makes clear, this drawing was prepared in responce to Soane's meeting with the Select Committee on 5 May 1824. Two windows in the linking range to Westminster Hall have been erased during the drawing process, and two of the lancet windows in the corner turet have been struck through.

There are also numerous dashed lines indicating the levels of the original Palladian façade to New Palace Yard, and one noting the difference between the height of the corner turret and the northern towers of Westminster Hall as seven feet.

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).