Scale
to a scale
Signed and dated
Medium and dimensions
Pencil, wash, coloured washes including burnt sienna, sepia, Payne's grey and yellow, within single ruled wash border on card (437 x 531)
Hand
Attributed to Gandy, Joseph Michael (1771--1843), draughtsman
Notes
This is one of the most finely wrought and evocative images of the New Law Courts' interiors. It has been worked up from one of the interior views shown on drawing SM Vol 83/64. Undoubtedly in Gandy's hand, the subtle building up of washes captures the complex interplay of high light sources, diffused through complexly inter-related volumes, of which the Lord Chancellor's Robing Room was arguably the pièce de résistance. The double-leaved doors in the eastern portal are open onto the Public Corridor. This drawing also provides the only visual evidence that the glazing in the lantern was tinted yellow, as was used elsewhere within the ancillary spaces of the New Law Courts. The recessed bands of rustication around the chimneypiece have been erased and redrawn. It is possible that this drawing was intended as a lecture drawing or a drawing for exhibition, but there is no evidence to support this. The latter revisions would undoubtedly militate against the drawing serving either as an exhibition or lecture drawing.
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).
