Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  [155] Presentation drawing, New Law Courts, before 13 December 1821

Browse

  • image SM 53/1/20

Reference number

SM 53/1/20

Purpose

[155] Presentation drawing, New Law Courts, before 13 December 1821

Aspect

Plan of the main (ground) floor of the New Law Courts, retaining only part of the existing walls of the Court of Common Pleas, with ceilings and skylight oculi for corridors shown, and buildings to be replaced indicated in unwashed line, as part executed

Scale

bar scale of 1/10 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Scale of Feet / Design submitted at the Treasury with an Estimate amounting to £100,000 / 13 Dec[embe]r. 1821 / Plan from which / the Estimate was formed

Signed and dated

  • before 13/12/1821
    John Soane L[incolns]. I[nn]. Fields. / 1821

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, wash, coloured washes of blue and pink and pen within hextuple ruled wash border pricked for tansfer on wove paper (955 x 635)

Hand

Sir John Soane RA (1753 - 1837), architect
This drawing is annotated in Soane's hand.
Possibly George Bailey (1792 - 1860), draughtsman

Watermark

J Whatman / 1821

Notes

The drawing is endorsed in Soane's hand, recording that it served to generate the estimate for constructing the New Law Courts, calculated by the Treasury Office. There are minor revisions (in pencil) to the corridor leading from the central block of The Stone Building to Westminster Hall.

Literature

Sawyer, 1999: p. 511, footnote 1505

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).